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
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.
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.
Fun fact: Linux has that “certification” to watch DRM content while Windows does not, which means you can use whatever browser you want on Linux but not on Windows to watch DRM content
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.
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
Yeah piracy was everywhere during the cassette tape and floppy disk era, I don’t think it just was called piracy yet back then
Bootlegging is what we called it as kids
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.
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.
Fun fact: Linux has that “certification” to watch DRM content while Windows does not, which means you can use whatever browser you want on Linux but not on Windows to watch DRM content
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.