I found MTV's coverage of "piracy" (which of course didn't exist back then) to be particularly enlightening. They clearly showed websites where people could listen to their favorite band's songs, and yet there was no mention of theft or the poor artists who won't get paid. Instead, they, and the artists they interviewed, cast it as a great way for fans to gain exposure to their music and interact with them. Dave Matthews comparing it to how "bootleg tapes spread the word about us" was particularly telling.

Maybe because it wasn’t really practical to download music from the web? What you could get was of obviously inferior quality and it was just not possible to download a lot of it. I think the music industry would be quite happy with a world in which every music file is a 32kbit/s MP3 and it’s not possible to download more than three or four songs per week.

It was no threat to anyone. The reaction at the time is not all that surprising, what might be surprising is that no one seems to have predicted the development.

I’m not even sure whether Frauenhofer’s (then still relatively new) MP3 encoder was already pirated in 1995 and quickly spreading through the web. That might not even have happened at that point in time.

Organized music piracy (mp3 scene) began in the summer of '96 when 3 of the major groups were formed (of which RNS was the most famous and long-lived). By '97 it was 'adopted' by the software (warez) scene, and also borrowed its supply and distribution chains--there was now competition for having the fastest releases, as well as means for getting these ahead of official release dates--precipitating popularity.

According to mp3scene.info, there's was mp3 piracy on usenet as early as '95.

I downloaded my first few MP3's in 1998. I was either on 33.6 or 56k. It took like an hour.

So the problem was clearly limited to university networks. The existence of MP3's doesn't indicate the advent of modern "piracy."

No, that began a couple years later of course when everybody began getting cable modems. And napster was written.

Funny how it comes around again but in circa 1995 everything was streaming using RealAudio so the music industry was pretty eager to have it available since the user never actually had the files. http://books.google.com/books?id=wAcEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA107&...

Hearing about that guy getting arrested for "transmitting porn online" makes me wonder how many people are going to jail right now because of Internet-related laws that will be proven to have been absurd, 15 years from now?

I was shocked by two egregious prosecutions mentioned in the video:

Jake Baker Arrested for posting rape/murder fantasy on the internet case dismissed

Robert Thomas Tried for transmitting porn on the internet sentenced to three years in prison

We must remain guarded against such assaults, even to this day. I don't think there has been much of a shift in politicians' technoliteracy or indeed their ulterior motives.

That kind of blew my mind too. Three years in prison for "transmitting porn", prosecuted in a state in which he didn't even reside? WTF.

Here's some more detail from the US Appellate Court: https://www2.bc.edu/~herbeck/cyberlaw.thomas.html

The main subtlety is that they took personal information when they charged for their content (the decision specifically says there's no squashing of freedom of speech, since they could have screened out people from TN).

Someone signing up with an account from TN is therefore analagous to someone mail-ordering porn from TN, which would also be illegal under this law.

"Some people would be strongly advised to avoid the Internet: the hypersensitive, the humor impaired, and Puritans of every stripe." -- Kurt Loder (MTV), 1995

Great quote.

HEY EVERYONE 1995 NEWT GINGRICH SAYS INTERNET PORN IS CONSTITUTIONAL

I still get a laugh at Hulu's 1996 index.htm page:

http://www.hulu.com/index.htm

In a sense, Moby was years ahead of his time. He identifies the social underpinnings of the internet which went on to flourish in the form of Facebook etc.

"we all have this basic deep need to communicate with other people, so I think that explains the popularity of something like this" Moby

I love all the websites! Flashy and totally original. Anyways, its interesting to see lot of people were referring to Internet as "cyber space", which was prevalent during those days. Surprisingly, nobody refers to Internet as cyberspace now a days.

Except they do. At the moment, search results on Twitter are largely polluted with the article in question, but you can still see plenty of everyday folk using the term. News outlets still use it all the time, and it's something a regular news.yc reader should see quite often: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+cybers...

Sure, the word 'cyberspace' is used everywhere these days, but I don't think it carries the same meaning it did back then. Virtual reality was "becoming" a thing of the present in 1995, and whenever the word cyberspace was used, it seemed to mean "sure, you're stuck in 2d now, but just wait a few more years and you'll be totally immersed in a 3d cyberspace." I guess I'm a little nostalgic about the old "cyberspace" :)

I remember being in junior high school and first hearing about "the information superhighway" and I was both confused and intrigued. I think it was a few years before I connected "information superhighway" and "internet" as being the same thing.

I think the most interesting thing about this video is that MTV didn't use to be crap.

David Bowie's stance at the end is interesting - just a few years later he launched his own ISP called BowieNet.

Best part..

"If you ain't on the information super highway baby then where is it?" - Coolio

"almost as cool as - well - television!"

I find the cyberpunk and mind-altering culture of the very early 90s Internet (referred to briefly in the video) to be fascinating. I wish I'd been a few years older so I could have properly witnessed it.

Random things I remember from the time:

* Billy Idol's strange Cyberpunk album http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_(album)

* Mondo 2000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondo_2000

I found Doug Rushkoff's Cyberia to be an effective substitute for having properly witnessed that era. It has the advantage of not being a look back, but a look around. I get the sense, in flipping through it again now, that a historical look at the era would leave out so many things that seemed important at the time but didn't subsequently flourish beyond the fringe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberia_(book)

The 'cyberpunk' thing always sounded cooler than any implementations actually were. You're currently living in an era where the contemporary, witnessable equivalent is steampunk.

"Whats attracted many of them is the World Wide Web, with its proliferation of special interest truck stops called websites". Oh Kurt Loder.

I didn't realise Coolio used to moonlight as an IT consultant.

i wonder if we've made progress at all...