“If the MP3 could reproduce Tupac at one-eleventh the bandwidth, and if Tupac could then be distributed, free, on the Internet, what the hell was the point of a compact disk?” The New Yorker’s Stephen Witt looks back at the dawn of music piracy and the man who broke the music business.

+ These kids today will never really appreciate how hard we had to work to steal music during the Internet’s early days. That all changed when world got a lot more wired. And many of those wires are running along the ocean floor. According to one expert, “the majority of the disruptions of our undersea network come from people dropping an anchor off their boat and hitting the cable, or a fisherman dragging a net on the bottom of the sea floor.”