Burning CDs. That’s how I know most people didn’t know how to do it, or want to put in the effort. You had to go buy a stack of CDs, hope your computer supported burning, had to make sure players could support the burned disc (depending on if you made a music disc or data disc, if it was rewritable), and spend the time to burn the disc.

Contrast that to ctrl+c ctrl+v.

There’s more people who can ‘duplicate’ digital files than there were people burning CDs.

The amount of people who will duplicate their tapes and CDs would be lower than the amount of people who will duplicate their digital files.

Most of the time when a law sounds silly for banning something when alternatives exist, it’s because people themselves are silly and don’t actually go for the alternatives at the same rate as they would the banned thing. Ie gun accessory bans, ninja star bans.