This all goes away as soon as id verification comes in
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 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 . 💁🏼♂️
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.
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
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
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.
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. 😅)
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.)
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. 🥲
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.
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.
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. 🤌🏼
Piracy didn’t start in 2006, before that there was limewire and Napster, and before that bootleg DVDs, and before that the MPAA spent billions lobbying to ban VHSs with a record function and get draconian punishments for recording movies.
I was downloading episodes of Jackass back in about 2001, using I think it would have been eMule.
You’d get a 240p MPEG-1 file, and you were happy with that.
Hilariously, for people who didn’t own computers that could handle playing videos from CD-Rs, as my PC’s video card had composite output I used to make VHS tapes from those files. And then put the adhesive label sheet for the tape cassette through the printer.
Y’know, normal stuff.
It was so widespread that around 2004-2005 you could buy dvd players that supported avi/mp4 files with external subtitles. They don’t create products like that for niche markets.
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 🤣
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.😅)
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. 🤣
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. 😅
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. 🖖🏼
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.
Piracy very much existed before the internet took off. Recording VHS, then burning dvd’s and cd’s, and the like. Many stores in the hood would openly sell burned cd’s even. Others out of the trunk of their cars.
And the need to pirate never went away, fuck netflix, never had them, never will.
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.
2007? Sit down junior.
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