OP must be a 2000s kid, because we were definitely pirating stuff over the Internet long before that.
They also didn’t mention Netflix’s DVD service, nor that it was really Steam that did what they described.
I would argue that what Steam did for video games is what Netflix did for movies and tv shows. They made the legal option way more convenient and affordable it wasn’t worth the hassle to pirate. That has changed now (at least in Netflix’s case).
Istg don’t jinx steam like this 🫠
I trust Steam for exactly as long as Gaben is heading it, once he dies or retires all bets are off
I reckon Napster was the first instance of piracy entering pop culture and that was in the late 90s. Of course it existed long before that (think anti-piracy measures from PC games in the 80s), but I would point to that as the pivotal moment.
I remember me being 14 and distributing stacks of 3,5" 1,44Mb floppies filled with copies of Doom to whoever wanted one, as long as i got the disks back later on
OP says ~2007 internet (asumming bandwidth and avail content) got good enough to become mainstem, not that I started around then.
It wasn’t that though. High speed internet was available before that time. What really affected things in 2006 was that peer exchange was introduced to bittorrent, giving it a massive advantage over other file sharing services at the time.
That’s… not a contrary point, that’s merely an addition to the stated fact from @unitedwithme@lemmy.today . 💁🏼♂️
Sometime around 2007
Bahahaha! Oh, OP, please tell us you’re ≈20yrs old without saying it outright. 🤣
To the point: I, and everyone I knew, was pirating everything they could —from the early 90s onward.
Yes, all of us would’ve “downloaded a car” in a heartbeat (well, maybe a week of them, at those baud modem speeds. 😅)
Our Apple User Group received a letter from Bill Gates back in the 1980s admonishing people for pirating his compiler. It was hilariously badly done.
How shamelessly ironic of him. 🤣🖕🏼
(Get fucked by an undead horde, Gates. You’re trying to be the Democrat among oligarchs —which hasn’t aged well at all, ya pedo.)
Yep. Grabbing photoshop 7 via zmodem from a wwiv bbs.
Hey, when they started listing it as a prereq for advanced design courses in school, I was 100% not gonna let my clever brain sit idle as my poor AF upbringing cost me another educational opportunity.
Fuck the Man, I crave knowledge and pursue it like it’s a civil right.
(FWIW, why it isn’t is kinda essential to this whole thread’s point, IMHO.}
Even a 20 year should know Napster saga (with all the implications involved) happened in 2001.
Spent much time around 20yr olds these days? 😅
No. So fair enough 🙂
There’s a reason why K-12 teaching roles’re preferred over those at the collegiate level. 🥲
Personally, I happened to choose the former before I knew the ins & outs of the US’ brand of Education™, and was relieved to find I’d chosen wisely (ie. luckily).
To each their own, of course, but gimme a classroom full of students that aren’t chewed up and spat out by life already (or well on their way) any day of the week.
Never mind the fact that most of said college students are fervently avoiding looking directly at their future decades’ of massive debt and barely-non-zero chance of a job that’ll put any meaningful dent in that viciously compounding sum. 🥲
Daisy chained vcr watch parties.
Jesus Christ, these kids really think nothing existed before widespread high speed internet adoption eh?
I was going to say, 2007 as the start date? lol.
I was downloading games off Home of the Underdogs in the 90s, and by the late 90s downloading anime off of file sharing had started to get big.
Yeah I was buying ripped, printed and mass produced pirated games from the early 90s.
And selling VHS with movies. Piracy is as old as time.
Woefully inaccurate, the entire P2P file sharing craze kicked off by Napster all went down before 2007 and there were plenty of online piracy venues before then too like IRC, 90s copper internet was perfectly capable of all that. And I was torrenting movies right alongside my Netflix DVD rentals. Piracy has always been here and has never left.
Filesharing pre-dates the web.
I mean, technically - the internet and computers run on copying functions. On the Internet, it literally reads a file from a computer system (or a database entry), and on a computer, the MOV assembly operation copies memory between registers and RAM.
Oh, yeah.
But I mean piracy filesharing. That was already popular on dial-in BBSes in the 80s.
For me, there was never any move to netflix or any streaming. Piracy has always been cheap and convenient, and I don’t want to deal with big corps
Also, piracy not popular before 2007? Pirate dvd/cd/vhs/etc stands were a very popular thing, at least around here. There was already a lot of piracy before the internet became popular
There was plenty of it going on around here. Even after Napster was taken down, there was Kazaa, Limewire, and your choice of Gnutella client. It was mostly us downloading stuff to listen to on the bus because high speed internet was rare unless you were in a city.
I never used netflix either. Their DRM won’t let me watch in 1080p because I’m not using a spyware infested browser and OS. Back when they had a good selection, my internet was too slow to stream HD video anyways.
Yeah piracy was everywhere during the cassette tape and floppy disk era, I don’t think it just was called piracy yet back then
It was also called piracy back then too. It was incredibly common on the Commodore 64 starting in the 80s . They’d often call themselves crackers, because you needed to crack the piracy protection to be able to copy disks.
Those disks and even cassettes would then be shared from person to person or sold in shops or on second hand markets. AFAIK this is also when 1337/leet became popularised, to avoid censorship on BBSes, where file sharing was also possible.
For example, a magazine from 1991:
Note the group is called Elite productions and they call themselves pirates. There’s also mention of crackers, specific events, and I especially enjoy that a piracy/cracking group felt it necessary to add a copyright logo next to the name of their piracy group which was called Elite Productions.
Notably, sometime in the 90’s or early 00s they made a law that made if a federal crime to break any sort of encryption on an electronic or data storage or whatever, at the behest of CD manufacturers.
at the behest of CD manufacturers.
Seems more likely to be content corps, not hardware manufacturers, that would benefit most from that bullshit “law”.
The difference comes out in the wash, though. They might as well have colored themselves red or blue (ahem), to help the cattle know what corpo team they prefer
—despite both colors having been painted onto the same greedy, amoral, and unchecked corpse golem.
Bootlegging is what we called it as kids
And, BBS, IRC, etc. were around long before the 90s, too. OP’s a child and/or this is low-effort agitprop. (ah, my fellow plebs in these comments that knew those times well…)
5-10 years ago I would have said agitprop but man, I’m getting old and more and more I feel the weight of things like Limewire and 9/11 being nouns the youngins genuinely don’t know. So I’m actually not sure lol
suddenly Netflix
You can’t give a history of online piracy and just entirely skip over music/limewire.
Pirating music was very popular for the short period where limewire could be used without fear. Then corporations started suing the shit out of normal people. Then apple opened the iTunes store, and pirating music became more niche again. No more burned cds from tracks discovered on limewire, but playlists with paid-for music on an iPod
I have been pirating music all of this time.
It’s only recently there are problems as the search engines don’t share good links anymore.
Idk about limewire, but there are all sorts of cloned sites of places like mp3juices that offer music.
The order here is a little wrong, but it’s mostly correct.
Production houses started to see Netflix raking in cash hand over fist and decided that they could do that too and started pulling their shows.
This made Netflix need to pivot hard into in-house content in order to not look like a barren wasteland.
I watched so much scifi on Netflix back in the day. It was really an end of an era moment when they lost Star Trek and Stargate.
Yeah I was about 5 seasons into stargate when it left. Later added it to Jellyfin, ezpz. You can go pretty far with a library card, or a vpn, or Usenet, or…
Hell, one can go pretty far these days with even less effort, IMHO. Maybe it just seems that way after my decades of practice?
I’ve always helped friends, family, kind strangers, etc. to get started on their own liberation journey, and it’s never been more than a few easily-parsed steps: from personal security, to finding the media of choice, to storing it properly, and of course sharing the data & process however they could —as a civic duty. 🤘🏼
“Piracy” (in a sense of unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials) was a thing ever since copyright became a thing. Otherwise you wouldn’t need copyright to be a law.
Movie/video piracy existed since the 80s, before TPB there were bootleg DVDs, before then there was bootleg VHS. For music it goes back even further, reel-to-reel machines which could copy entire albums at good-enough quality existed back in the 1950s, and compact cassettes got good-enough for music in the 70s.
I remember watching so many movies that I had either taped off television or scraped from one VHS to another. I had a double feature of Krull and Logan’s Run. I watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit? anytime I wanted. The Empire Strikes Back had been briefly taped over with a few minutes of a Who’s the Boss episode, such that I never saw the scene where Luke hides in an animal carcass until those movies were rereleased in the… late 90s I think? I had cassette mix tapes with songs taken from radio or my dad’s record collection.
In my case, i went back to physical media. Bought a blhray player and now my boyfriend and I are gradually expanding our movie library when we feel like it. Some movies and shows don’t exist on dvd/bluray, but that’s okay. I think there is something healthy about not having access to absolutely everything you want at all times. Besides, for me, there is also something satisfying in having ti get up from the couch and change discs and so on. I missed the physical aspect of watching movies and remember how much streaming services fried my fucking brain while i still used them.
It was to the point where you barely register wtf you are watching because everything on streaming services is about the next thing.
Movies werent movies on streaming services, but content and I heard people starting to refer to movies and shows as content at some point and was like “this is fucked”.
Content. Content to fill the void. Not to experience or educate, enlighten or provoke your senses and morality. Just content to distract you.
Ew.
I dont mimd piracy, but i prefer physical media. I no longer wish to follow technollgical advancements. I want to go back and stay at a place where there was some level of conscious and physical effort to watch a movie. That way you remember it better, you slow down and you appreciate the piece of art in front of you rather than seeing it as content.
Get a pioneer Bluray drive for the stuff you cant get on disc, you can always burn it : )
I’ll consider it! I want Pluto (2023) on dvd or bluray, but it is on lock on netflix and i simply refuse to subscribe to that shit. I have a soft spot for Naoki Uwasaki. He’s one of the only mangaka living today, who manages to tell stories that I like.
But yeah, i dont know how piracy deals with language and subtitle options in today’s landscape. Because I prefer to have options and I’m not sure I could get a pirated dvd version where i can switch language and/or subtitles while watching.
But thank you for the the tip, friend! I have starred your comment so i can find it if/when i look into it. 🤗❤️
It would be easiest to get a complete ISO file and just burn that to a DVD of course, but barely anyone is dealing in ISOs these days, if they even exist at all. You can take regular MKV or MP4 files and structure them into a DVD format with DVD Styler.
For a lot of anime at least, look for releases tagged Dual-Audio or Multi-Audio and find the one with the dubs you want. Subtitle tracks are a crapshoot, because they’re so small and easy to edit, so you have to look at descriptions to figure out which ones are included and from which sources (official, fansub). This is less of an issue for non-anime, you’ll usually get every sub track from the original source.
You might have to use Handbrake or ffmpeg to get your MKV source files in a format that DVD Styler accepts. (I saw it doesn’t list MKV support, but it is just a container format for all the things it does list.)
Piracy very much existed before the internet took off. Recording VHS, then burning dvd’s and cd’s, and the like. Many stores in the hood would openly sell burned cd’s even. Others out of the trunk of their cars.
And the need to pirate never went away, fuck netflix, never had them, never will.
Recording vhs for home use didn’t even count as piracy i think.
My dads friend group already wildly shared and copied commodore 64 games and music though.
It’s not fully accurate to lay the blame at the feet of Netflix. At the time, they just saw the writing on the wall and did what they had to do to survive. Their catalog was massive because, early on, no one thought streaming would work. They had a massive collection of shows and movies that didn’t pull enough of an audience to air on TV for ad revenue. Netflix was able to get a TON of long-term deals that they used to grow, but when those contracts were coming due, the rights holders pulled out and started trying to make their own services. At that point, Netflix basically had to become a studio and pivot to original content, or else they wouldn’t have content at all.
The long and the short of it is that because Netflix was first, it got to set the stage for the golden age of streaming, but because it worked, it was inevitable that streaming would become cable.
It’s not Netflix’s fault. It’s just the course of the entertainment business. They suck now, but back then, I couldn’t think of a single bad thing to say about them… well, maybe that they got rid of the 5-star rating system. That system was definitely used to get metrics for their early programming.
It’s just the course of the entertainment business.
And it works like that for every medium. Guy invents printing bibles and before you know it there are pamphlet and advertisement. Radio wanted to educate and bring peace and soon enough you got propaganda and advertisement.
Radio was the latter long before the efforts toward the former began…
early on, no one thought streaming world work
Yeah, I recall the FUD there being so gawdamn insipid back then. Just gossipy regurge from malinformed archair experts. Thus began my realization that “adults” only got that way by outliving those even stupider —but, every day’s a new chance, eh?
He skipped over LUSERnet and LimeWire, which was before 2007. Usenet was a big sharing community too before 2007.
Piracy has always been around. It’s the underhand method of getting what someone wants. Empires didn’t mint coins because it was fun, but they needed to identify forgeries. Also, scales were used (and people would use lead) to trick it instead of coin.
I don’t mean to draw attention to it but Usenet never went away, it’s still the best place to find a lot of interesting articles in my opinion.
Piracy didn’t start in 2006, before that there was limewire and Napster, and before that bootleg DVDs, and before that the MPAA spent billions lobbying to ban VHSs with a record function and get draconian punishments for recording movies.
I was downloading episodes of Jackass back in about 2001, using I think it would have been eMule.
You’d get a 240p MPEG-1 file, and you were happy with that.
Hilariously, for people who didn’t own computers that could handle playing videos from CD-Rs, as my PC’s video card had composite output I used to make VHS tapes from those files. And then put the adhesive label sheet for the tape cassette through the printer.
Y’know, normal stuff.
It was so widespread that around 2004-2005 you could buy dvd players that supported avi/mp4 files with external subtitles. They don’t create products like that for niche markets.
I mean, if we’re not restricting “media piracy” to digital, there was an entire subculture that ran bootlegs of live music events for the diehard connoisseurs, and the archivists had insane collections dating long into those pre-digital decades —including completely unpublished instances of world famous bands like The Grateful Dead, The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, CCR, Jimi Hendrix, etc.
But, hey, it’s not like modern day has seen corpo dumbasses scramble to recover data corrupted by time, shitty storage SoP, etc., only to tap one or more of these driven, fastidious, longtime collectors to ask if they could burn/dub/cut a copy… you know, like pirates. 🤣
The real winners here are pirates because thanks to companies streaming quality media, we get quality pirated media the moment or hours later, whereas with film we had to wait until DVD until we got quality pirated film.
I definitely don’t miss cam rips. No movie was worth that wonky, noisy, messy version with bozo breathing into the cam mic and people standing up in front of you.
