This all goes away as soon as id verification comes in
Also, production companies started pulling their shit from netflix long before Netflix Originals became a thing. Wrong on all accounts
“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, relatively 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.
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
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.
Daisy chained vcr watch parties.
2007? Sit down junior.
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. 🤗❤️
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.
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.
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.
Before 2007, but mostly yes.
You wouldn’t download a car!!! I would if I could and soon with 3d printers you bet I will!
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.
Fidonet anyone?
Sorry grandpa. All your friends are dead.
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.
Never paid for any of these streaming shit
