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.

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?

Radio was the latter long before the efforts toward the former began...

Yep. OP's entire statement smells of "I wasn't paying attention < '07", and that's only one point in the series.

"Caused" is probably a more appropriate and less loaded term.

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...)

Surprised that didn't 1337 the name. 🤣

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.

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. 🤘🏼

Never paid for any of these streaming shit

Yep. Grabbing photoshop 7 via zmodem from a wwiv bbs.

Let's not forget those fuckin' DJs that talked during a song and forced one to wait again for that track to be played —hoping they wouldn't stroke their persona to the silent, imagined fan base... but they always did. 🤌🏼

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.

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.

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.

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. 🤣

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.

STRAYYYyyyyAYyyAYYY! No regrets cause I got nothing to loooose! Eeeeeverrrrrr stray! 🎶

2001? Did you miss the CKY2K skate tape where they went to Iceland? That was my first and last Jackass vid, NGL.

I already knew plenty of trigger-happy, high-energy, rush-hungry, "epic" shenanigan asshats, and watching those rodeo-clown orphans do the same was pretty redundant, all things considered.

IMHO, it was the viewers/fans that figured they could improve on the method themselves that were the more clear & present danger.

Back then, you knew which white kid spent their childhood in a McDojo (thanks, Daniel-san), which one spent those years fishing/hunting w/ dear old dad/uncle/gramps, which one found proper metal early on, which one was gonna get hooked on glue, which one was a little too into Faces of Death... and which one thought anything could be a "prank".

Yeah, no. Bam's had an ass-whoopin' comin' for yeeears, but I guess he caught up with himself, after all. 🧏🏼‍♂️

(oof, sorry, that was much longer than I thought.😅)

Someone in some boardroom somewhere actually listened to their techs at some point leading to to then, is all.

There was an enormous, fairly tight-lipped and self-sanitizing subculture dedicated to consuming their preferred media in that way, so of course they were super interested in an untapped profit source.

Even if that meant pivoting toward totally not condoning piracy, but here's a thing that could make that more enjoyable 🤣

Well yes, I was born December 27, 1998

Stop cutting onions 🥹

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. 😅

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.}

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.

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.)

Istg don't jinx steam like this 🫠

You wouldn't download a car!!! I would if I could and soon with 3d printers you bet I will!

It never left, but common folks decreased reliance on it substantially.
When Netflix was popular my house of IT people slowed and almost stopped pirating video content entirely, there was no reason.
After Netflix turned shit and half a dozen services sprung up, we cancelled Netflix and now pirate absolutely everything video. There was a slight drop while crunchyroll was good, but it becasue shit enough apparently that those in my family using it returned to pirating.

Music didn't shitify as much though, I feel it's improved now. I have Tidal because it's cheap and easy to find new music. I seldom find music that I can't listen to on Tidal.

Elegedly.

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.

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 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.

Netflix didn't have a choice but to get into production and producers were going to see their money anyways and get into streaming. There was only one way forward that was sensible for both groups.

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.

Fidonet anyone?

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 : )

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

Daisy chained vcr watch parties.

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.)

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.

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.

Even a 20 year should know Napster saga (with all the implications involved) happened in 2001.

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.

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.

Spent much time around 20yr olds these days? 😅

Stalin? Oh, sweetie, what a reach. Ad hominem, too? Oof.