BladeEnc
The Blade Encoder, known widely as BladeEnc, was an illegal open source MP3 compression utility distributed anonymously via .zip files on UseNet discussion boards, warez FTPs, Scandinavian hobbyist sites, and largely dormant university servers in the mid-1990's. Ostensibly written by Scandinavian programmer Tord Jansson, BladeEnc's compression algorithm was notable for producing dramatically reduced fidelity, including garbled vocals, digital noise floor, and pseudo-phasing effects. Despite its limitations, the utility became widely used by hackers[1] and tech-literate music enthusiasts to encode and upload music.[2] BladeEnc operated in a legal void: it used the ISO reference implementation of the MP3 format, which was technically protected by a lattice of Fraunhofer and Thomson Multimedia patents.
“BladeEnc wasn’t illegal in the way drugs are illegal. It was illegal in the way abandoned malls are illegal: unsupervised, echoing, and full of ghosts.” — Unknown .nfo file, 1999
- ↑ Including, infamously, the hacker rap collective Konami Dream who used the software as part of its illegal "phreaqueleak" campaign.
- ↑ A practice bolstered by the release of WinAmp 1.0 in the late 1990's.