Jesus Christ, these kids really think nothing existed before widespread high speed internet adoption eh?
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.
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.
2007? Sit down junior.
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Daisy chained vcr watch parties.
“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.
Also, production companies started pulling their shit from netflix long before Netflix Originals became a thing. Wrong on all accounts
This all goes away as soon as id verification comes in
bad history.
even in 2007, piracy was a niche thing. your lame cousin probably didn’t download from demonoid or the pirate bay. more people did then than now but it wasn’t substantial.
there was still a reason to pirate even with netflix–there was a ton of content not available on DVD at that time.
at least 10 years ago all the good private torrent sites became severely restricted, some even entirely closing the doors for new members.
not sure where this piracy resurgence is going on, but it’s not on the good sites.
Yeah, Napster was released in 1999 and was huge. Everyone in college in the early 00s was using file sharing networks to download stuff. It wasn’t everyone but it was pretty big.
The real answer is that many people in this thread are personally pirating less because they are old; when you have the money, it’s often just faster and easier to pay, and for games there are some genuine advantages to eg. owning a game on Steam so you can use cloud saves. Most piracy has always been teenagers and college students, since they often can’t buy the stuff they want.
This is the same reason why, in the late 90’s and early 00s, anime piracy in particular was huge - distribution barely existed for most shows and when it did it was wildly overpriced.
I don’t think its fair to say piracy was niche in the early 2000s either though, everyone had napster or limewire/frostwire.
And netflix wasn’t originally streaming only, they started out as online DVD rentals which exploded and then added streaming as a second offering (only discontinuing DVD rentals in 2023).
The modern piracy resurgence is certainly not torrents, though for the power users it is (or usenet), its online streaming sites like whatever the equivalent of 123movies is these days
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 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 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 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
ahhh, the halcyon days of downloading Utada mp3s via dialup cuz no store outside of Japan, neither online nor brick mortar, even sold them.
and bragging about it on AIM!
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 . 💁🏼♂️
Well yes, I was born December 27, 1998
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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?
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
Same. Or a burnt copy for physical discs.
My Cantonese-speaking wife taught me the term fan-ban when we were dating and I’ve been calling it that ever since.
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
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.
Surprised that didn’t 1337 the name. 🤣
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.
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.
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
Yep. OP’s entire statement smells of “I wasn’t paying attention < '07”, and that’s only one point in the series.
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. 🤘🏼
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. 😅)
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. 🥲
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.}
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.)
The order is a bit off. Production companies starting pulling their content from Netflix after they saw how profitable streaming services could be.
This forced Netflix to start producing their own content.
No, the order is correct. NF started commissioning originals in 2013, and for a while everything worked out as NF used the same terms of trade as other broadcasters.
Some years later NF decided they would insist on a worldwide exclusivity buyout for any commissioned content and high-value library. This meant studios could no longer deficit finance. It made more sense to open their own platforms and take the revenue themselves for their properties.
forced
That’s humanizing the corp way too generously. Nothing “forced Netflix to start producing [its] own content” but itself. 🤑
“Caused” is probably a more appropriate and less loaded term.
No. That’s still removing the onus from the corpos. Fuck that simping.
re: your handle : I’d totally watch Uncle Buck as Paul Revere (or as the Duke of Wellington), FWIW. I guess I’ll have to wait until the Disney-Sony shite machine pushes it through their botfarm to raise that dead legend for the screen.
Simping? I rephrased my idea a bit for the sake of argument but I understand their motivation and their behaviour.
I’d say you’re one to talk about handles with yours being some reference to Bill & Ted and Joseph Stalin but I think it might be lost on you.
Stalin? Oh, sweetie, what a reach. Ad hominem, too? Oof.
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.
I was downloading cracked video games from BBSes in the early '80s.
C64?
Atari 800.
Almost 50 years ago…
When’s your next prostate check?
That’s between me and your dad’s penis
Sorry to tell you this, but my father is not a medical doctor.
Remember when games’ code was printed in the back pages of compsci periodicals? Yeah, that shit was crazy, and any/all bugs were often your own damn fault. 😅 What a teachable moment, every time.
I remember spending what felt like months typing in a game from Compute! magazine and never getting it to work.
Edit: It was Dragonmaster from this issue. It looked so cool to me, but as I mentioned I never got it running.
Ha! I remember that one! And a “Conan” one, IINM? Another one like Zaxxon, but before its time, and others that riffed on (or predicated) other retail titles —as was the style at the time.
Even when I could get them to run, my younger siblings’d beg to try it, and somehow bork the thing by merely touching the keyboard —or it certainly seemed so 🤣
edit: Oh, man! I just checked out the link, and totally recognize that dragon as the one that changed the way I drew its kind for far longer than I’d like to admit. 😅
