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
Yep. OP’s entire statement smells of “I wasn’t paying attention < '07”, and that’s only one point in the series.
Yeah piracy was everywhere during the cassette tape and floppy disk era, I don’t think it just was called piracy yet back then
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.
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.
Surprised that didn’t 1337 the name. 🤣
Bootlegging is what we called it as kids
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
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.
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.
Anyone who had a dual cassette deck back in the 80’s didn’t have much issue copying music or game cassettes. Floppy disks were easy to copy too.
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. 🤌🏼
History? That’s cute.
“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.
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.
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?
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.
I remember paying $30 USD for a DVD with 3-4 episodes at most of an anime series. 26 episode Cowboy Bebop season? ~$120 USD.
Sure I downloaded that episode of Excel Saga once (❤️). It was 320x240 and took more than a day on my 56k dialup.
At some point I remember going on ebay and buying the entirety of Witch Hunter Robin (which at the time, I chose over Naruto that had just started airing as well, this would turn out to be an important tone setting point in my life …) and getting it for ~$20 USD. Basically just the cost of someone else to download it and burn it to CD for me. Did the same thing with Wolf’s Rain.
Good memories. Of the anime. This shit always sucked.
Wolf’s Rain
Now there a name I’ve not heard in a long time… 🥹
STRAYYYyyyyAYyyAYYY! No regrets cause I got nothing to loooose! Eeeeeverrrrrr stray! 🎶
Stop cutting onions 🥹
2007? Sit down junior.
While VALVe somehow made piracy obsolete for video games then after that they decide to make gaming on linux easier jumpstart the pc handheld market AND making one of the best first party controllers
I forgot about the controller! I want one.
I’ve got three that don’t see any use, with a case & rechargeable batteries for each. Feel free to DM and I’ll send you one, not a worry. 🖖🏼
Daisy chained vcr watch parties.
never paid for netflix or other services, some people never had the money for it and continued buying some films (DVDs were still sold until 2019 pretty widely here) or renting a film every X time and pirating others until the first became impossible and piracy was the only thing.
then the streaming services go to shit with subscription fees, not getting all the content and such, and you see people who showed off being able to pay for those services before or still keep one struggling to get content and slightly becoming pirates again.
this is the other side of the situation. you warned them, they trusted the corpos, and corpos gave them shit.
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.
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. 🤗❤️
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.)
