
The Kafkaesque Battle of Soulseek and PayPal - DiabloD3
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/kafkaesque-battle-soulseek-and-paypal-and-why-free-speech-defenders-should-be
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morsch
Paypal and Kafkaesque in the same sentence don't come as a surprise, but I
_am_ shocked that Soulseek is still a thing.

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trill1
Soulseek is still really useful, especially after the crackdown on
Megaupload/Mediafire/Rapidshare.

For niche and obscure music, it's always been superior to torrenting IMO.

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URSpider94
You mean out-of-copyright music, or music being shared by the copyright
holders, right?

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soylentcola
I understand what you're saying but there are also lots of instances where you
simply cannot find something for sale anywhere and sometimes I simply don't
mind flouting copyright rules if it's the only way to locate a copy.

Trust me, I've purchased plenty of used CDs or other formats on eBay or Amazon
and will gladly do so again rather than bother with the hunt on Soulseek or
other sources of unlicensed downloads. But in the end, as "entitled" as it may
make me, I'd rather resort to copyright infringement than never find a copy of
that (song/album/etc) from the tape or CD I lost in college that's just not
available anymore.

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martindale
Glad they mention Bitcoin in the article. Bitcoin, as long as it trends
towards decentralization and not away from it [1], eliminates these problems
in the long run.

[1]:
[https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=923.0](https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=923.0)

~~~
ChemicalWarfare
What's funny is in the article they are saying "many of the Bitcoin payment
service providers, are bound by their agreements to Visa and MasterCard", in
reality though you don't need a payment provider to send bitcoin to anyone and
to top that off - the use case we're looking at here which is "donations" is
perfectly fitted for bitcoin, you just provide your address on your site for
ppl to send coin to and you're done.

Where bitcoin payment providers come into play is when a company is taking
bitcoin as a method of payment for their goods and services which is not the
case here.

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lukasb
dammit, first rule of soulseek is

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k__
haha, yes it was a bit of a underground thing.

From 2002 to 2006 I was listening mostly JRock only.

First we used Kazaa to get the music, since it wasn't sold in my country.

Later most people switched to Soulseek.

Was pretty nice... a bit like IRC. Only that the chat was rather bad.

Also the global search sucked, so you had to browse every person in the chat
yourself.

But this made it also a bit more social, hehe.

~~~
soylentcola
My favorite was always Audiogalaxy but yeah, Soulseek really filled a niche
before you could find a lot of stuff legally on Amazon or even eBay if it
wasn't sold in stores.

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yarou
PayPal still exists?

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stuart78
Haven't used Soulseek in years. Mac client... Love it.

