Software piracy existed long before the internet and it simply moved from offline copying to bulletin boards to internet-based FTP sites, Usenet and IRC and such once that became common and now I guess mostly P2P.
Bill Gates famously ranted over hobbyists that copied Altair Basic interpreter that he had part in developing back in 1976. Not the first occurance of piracy either, but maybe the first time anyone actually described it as stealing.
The use of the word “piracy” describing unlicensed copying dates hundreds of years back, to book plagiarism and copying. Much later also applied to music bootlegs.
Something to note is in the earlier years of computing software being copy written was not really a thing. The big thing was software for getting a specific piece of hardware to work. Most people were just concerned with getting things working, so when people came along with software they wanted you to pay for it was not really normal. Making the software something you paid for was a change, and so making it difficult to copy or distribute the software was not incentivised.
I expect the first breach of license was probably not because of intentional piracy, rather it was probably just a mistake or misunderstanding.
I think the first thing I ever downloaded, c 1989, was a car.
Porn. The internet is made of Porn. Always has been.
Maybe “Lenna” AKA Lena Forsén, a 1960s Playboy model who’s picture was scanned in the early 1970s and used up and down in image processing research. Has a Wikipedia article.
Are you asking us or the first one ever? Must be some shared academic work over arpa if you mean in general
The history of software piracy is a reverse history. Somewhere in the 1960s code was getting robust enough that people would share their code across government and academic computers. By the time the home computer market became a thing in the 70s (Altair & BBS) sharing code was how enthusiasts actually learned to do things on their devices. Then in last days of disco a weird little Little St. James Island frequent flyer wrote a paper in a popular computing mag arguing that programmers should share because he was a greedy little entitled asshole who became the world’s first cintabillionaire by taking the OS code already freely shared with other programmers, copying it, slapping a copyright in it, and selling it back to the company that did most of the work on it.
One of the best jokes of the 90s:
“Windows 95 is a 32bit port of a 16bit shell for a 8bit clone of a 4bit operating system by a two bit company that can’t stand one bit of competition.”
Iirc doom was pretty widely pirated at the time, I might double check.
Edit: Romero estimates roughly 70-90% of copies were pirated, which would be actually insane given the popularity of the time
It was almost certainly software like a game
Before even local networking was really a thing, people were pirating games by just sharing the disks
Don’t copy that floppy!
Oh yeah. Shared a lot of Sierra games 30+ years ago!
Me and a mate of mine downloaded Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within on dial up when it first came out.
On a large scale, maybe music? I’m a millennial though, this might be before my time.
i remember the game Stunts and Scorched Earth. One of them had a modal pop up and ask you to type a word from the manual. So whenever i found it pirated it always had the manual someone hand typed into a txt file. The good ole days.
Although Napster and music downloading really put it into the public eye, the first thing pirated, was definitely a game. We used to have to look up code words in the instruction manual to prove that we bought the game LOOONG before most people knew the high seas even existed.
Pirating games pre-dated a lot of widespread personal computers. I had some bootleg Atari 2600 games on audio tape with a module you could use to load them onto the console.
I remember photocopying game manuals at school to get around this. Lol
LucasArts and I think Sierra games would put red/blue text blocks where you had to put the red film over the text to read it. Photocopying yielded a black box.
My dad had some games that came with a “Lenslok”. You had to hold it up to the screen to decode the password.
The first things I saw reproduced without permission online, in 1996, were pornography, poetry, and videogames.
Specifically on the net? Because piracy was a thing before the net.
First “pirated” game i ever got was Elite for the Acorn Archimedes in 1991. Came with a photocopied manual which was essential as the anti-piracy measure was having to type in a word from the manual (think 4th word of the 3rd line of page 12 sort of thing).
That was given to me on a floppy disk.
I’m pretty sure we pulled Dune2 off Usenet.
