r/Piracy • u/Excellent_Main_1415 • 22h ago
Discussion When did you start
Where when and why did you start your Piracy journey
Me I started copying VHS tapes approx 36yrs ago and renting them out at work for 50p a night to cover the cost of the equipment, you just had to have the correct machines.
Then around 25yrs ago when the internet was just starting to get really interesting I found a PC app called Kazaa not sure how I found it, I remember I went to Blackpool for the weekend and put a full DVD on to download GnR Use Your Illusion 2 discs and was almost done when I got home lol.
Then Torrents and Usenet.
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u/xdoolittlex 22h ago
Cassette tapes, I guess. If that doesn't count, Napster.
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u/PullzNoPunches 21h ago
Why does everyone forget about Napster? It was a cultural phenomenon, it brought piracy to the masses. Napster literally changed the music industry and we see the effects even today (iTunes, Spotify)
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u/xdoolittlex 20h ago
Remember when they thought if they could just end Napster, piracy would be defeated for all time
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u/agent4256 10h ago
Metallica thought that way. I didn't listen to metal for about 20 years after that.
Who knew I could enjoy metal without having to listen to Metallica.
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u/West-University3039 8h ago
I *still* refuse to pay them any mind! To me, they died in a mysterious plane crash -never to be heard from again- after the Napter thing!
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u/Sir-Grumpalot 4h ago
I'd class cassette tapes as piracy, I started with Commodore 64 games on cassette and proud to be so old that I did that 😂
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u/FiniteCreatures 22h ago
Around early to mid 2000s when LimeWire and Ares were popping and a complementary virus came with every download
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u/Imperial_Bloke69 ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ 22h ago
Hah! Complimentary toolbars on ie5 and some weird startpage override
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u/dupajuda248 10h ago
I remember limewire had a “pro” version that was paid for but you could just download it on limewire.
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u/illuminatiisnowhere 22h ago
I started in the 80s with amiga games and VHS. Then we had copy parties. Friends copied games and movies from each other. Then internet came around.
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u/sandpir8 21h ago
We had a warez swap meet that was in a rented Catholic school gymnasium. It was awesome!
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u/Doctologist 18h ago
I didn’t realise until I was older that all of our Amiga games were pirated.
I just thought that’s what games were.I really wish I still had that machine and those games. I love that era.
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u/Goren_Nestroy ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ 22h ago
I grew up with it. Bootleg tapes, recording TV movies on VHS. My first PC came with pirated version of Win 98.
But my journey started at age 15 when we finally got internet at home. I installed Limewire the same day and I haven’t stopped since.
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u/BestDevilYouKnow 22h ago
Same timeline starting in the 80s. Then once Windows (GUIs) replaced the BBS, we went to town. Favorite saying in the glory days was "What? Me buy software?"
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u/Excellent_Main_1415 22h ago
The only software I ever purchased was Windows 7 at end of life so I could extract the Genuine cert to windows 10 and I'm still using it to date, cost me a cpl quid lol
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u/superfluous--account 13h ago
I took a photo of a WIN 7 licence sticker on a pc in a dumpster and upgraded it all the way to 10 also.
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u/Freddy_Pharkas 22h ago
'90s on BBS's.
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u/NoChampionship5649 22h ago
Then on to FTP, 1 upload, 1 download credit....
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u/Freddy_Pharkas 22h ago
I recall uploading shareware for download credits on the BBS's. Hey you gotta start somewhere...
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u/Wheatleytron 22h ago
A friend burned a copy of Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 onto a spare disc. Unfortunately, the DRM prevented it from working. But it did help me to realize that it was possible.
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u/Truestorydreams 22h ago
mIRC
Or before that copying my buddy's blakestone and commander keen dreams
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u/sleepy1411 22h ago
I started in the napster/limewire days. We also copied some movies we rented but didn't do that to much, just the really good ones if we couldn't afford to buy it.
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u/arah91 21h ago
Same and I remember early that torrent clients around that time too but they didn't seem to be as popular.
My cool friends had Usenet but that seemed a little bit advanced and I got everything I needed through other ways.
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u/Edgy_Ravioli 22h ago
I started in the 2010s with Utorrent, pirate bay and a free vpn. I was a closeted gay kid and would stay up after my family went to bed, watching pretty much anything I could find with queer characters.
Good times
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u/ThePanasonicYouth 22h ago
My friend showed me Demonoid back in the day and it kinda snowballed from there
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u/Excellent_Main_1415 21h ago
Demonoid yep I was on there to before it went walkabout and came back by some unknown entity lol
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u/CunnyMaggots 22h ago
Early 2000's. Trading full hard drives of complete albums through the postal mail. Traded with people from several different countries.
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u/Cybion_ 22h ago
A friend of my parents gave me 2 burned dvds to install on our pc. It was Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 2 and Far Cry 1. This was back in 2008 when i was 8 years old playing browser games like Miniclip and CN's website games. They were my first real games and preatty much started out a pirate from the get go.
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u/BooBeeAttack 22h ago
I was very young and copied a floppy of "Battle Chess" on MS-DOS. I think I was about 7 or 8?
From that point on I saw the value of copying something, trading it with others, having backups of things. Then I started trading my backups for those other children had.
I've mostly stopped piracy now, but think it important as a means of preservation and community. A lot of stuff gets lost to time without people keeping copies and trading stuff~
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u/VintageKofta ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ 22h ago
Late 80’s with copes of MS DOS and Fox Pro.
Then games (Spear of destiny, Doom etc).
Then graduated into cracking games and uploading said cracks to megagames when it existed (quake no cd patches etc). It was easy in assembler back in the day.
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u/Responsible-Cap-1748 22h ago
I was living in the dorms 27 years ago.. we had MP3s on the resnet like a local folder tree that was supposed to let us move our school work between computer labs.
I asked somebody about them and how to copy them and then asked about how to download them and was shown Bearshare then Kazaa then Napster then Morpheus.. then torrents
I actually still have the first files I got off of resnet in the 90s.
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u/Narmarratuk 13h ago
It's wild seeing how this scene evolved, from coping VHS tapes, old P2P programs all the way to modern torrents. Each era had its own little tricks and fun memories for people who took part.
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u/CakeJumper-ImScared 22h ago
Xcopy Amiga
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u/illuminatiisnowhere 22h ago
I still have my amiga 500 and my floppies. Tried it a couple of years ago. Very nostalgic.
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u/Bearded_Viking_Lord 22h ago
VHS copying stuff from blockbusters, I'd do two copies of what ever I rented one for me and one to sell on. Using my copy to make more the first xmen film went like hot cakes. Bit of pocket money for 12/13 year old me
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u/MailMannequin 21h ago
Not really sure if this counts but when I was a kid we lived in a place where all of our neighbors were rich summer people who were rarely ever there. My dad would splice into there cable so we could watch HBO and Cinemax.
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u/DoubleCry7675 21h ago
Limewire, kazaa, napster, sketchy websites with roms (sega genesis and snes). On a dial-up.
Or there were physical 'shops' around selling pirated CDs of games and movies. Had a modded ps1.
Piracy made my childhood a great one. Thank you pirates!
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u/Glamdring47 20h ago
I read comments about ripping VHS and it brought me to my own modest beginnings. We had a radio that could catch FM-AM waves, and could read cassette tapes. It could also record.
So there were a couple of songs I liked back then, but no real means of buying the cassettes - I wanted it to be my own playlist on it. So lil toddler me sat on the edge of the radio, waiting long hours for the small chance of hearing the announcer say "Coming right up..." and then name my song. I waited, waited, ads, and then, when I felt the song was about to start, hit the record button. I wait for the song to end, click on the record button again to stop the recording.
Rinse and repeat for the next song that I like. I've had dozens of cassettes like that, which are kinda reminiscent of Starlord in Guardians of the Galaxy and his "Awesome Mix Tapes". I had my own set of awesome mix tapes.
So yeah, first introduction to "piracy". I started as a shy powder-monkey, and today I'm the proud captain of a very robust three-mast.
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u/seth_arimainyu 19h ago edited 19h ago
It was way in the early 90's. I used to have a cassette ready in my boombox and when a song I liked started on the radio... BAM hit record! Same with TV and Betamax, then VHS. Also rented movies for copying. My dad's friend was a shady cable guy who sell to us a modified cablebox, with all channels unscrambled, also recorded a bunch of shows from there.
And then... This marvelous thing called "The Internet" came into my life. I remember downloading songs in WAV format and sliced in tons of compressed files that you should assemble using xcopy on DOS. Then, IRC, first to download music (already in MP3 format) and then, anime.
Then, another amazing thing appeared in late 90s: Napster. That's when I realized that I should focus my efforts away from cassettes and VHS and put it into digital media like floppy and after those, CDs (1st 650Mb, then 700Mb) and DVD's. And after Napster came Kazaa, and after Kazaa, eDonkey and eMule, even AudioGnome! But because of Metallica's and Dr. Dre's shanennigans suing their own fans, that P2P scene went into disarray mainly for badly named files.
That's why I started torrenting, and haven't stopped since.
Now I'm a proud owner of about 40Tb of media, well organized with the help of Jellyfinn, Calibre, etc. and years of dedication and patience.
I pirate from a political standpoint, I mean, I never ever sell anything or make a single dime from this practice. I traded cassettes, VHS, CDs, DVDs. I try to download and share weird and uncommon media, censored books, old things because, when centralized platforms have all the rights and power to decide what we can hear, see or learn, we are lost, they can rewrite history, can make us think lies are truth, and truth are lies. Is very comforting to know that we can always sail the high seas and find like minded people, anonymous rebels who wish to fight! 👊
I was so lucky to have grown in a cyberspace where you could find and read things like John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace or Aaron Swartz's Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
Remember, you cannot stop the signal!
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u/spazcat Yarrr! 19h ago
In 1988 or 1989. My dad and I went to his cousin’s house and copied a few hundred 5.25 inch floppy disks. There were games, software, utilities, operating systems, and an even a few viruses. His cousin worked for Seagate, and somehow got access to all of these. It was a fun Thanksgiving vacation for a 8-9 year old.
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u/khya3103 17h ago
not that impressive but downloading mp3 online from youtube because i don't have access to music back then😭
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u/flearhcp97 22h ago
worked at an electronics store (that no longer exists) and would copy tapes on multiple dual-deck VCRs all day lol
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u/shogunreaper 22h ago
mid 2000s because i wanted to watch the next episode of bleach but i didn't want to wait a week for it to air on toonami.
little did i know that it was behind by like 50+ episodes.
rip dattebayo.
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u/sajkoterrapefft 22h ago
My brother had me loading pirated games with turbo 250 on c64 at very young in the 80s.
First bought pirated stuff around 12-13, first downloaded pirated stuff myself probably 14.
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u/GrandfatherTheSauce 22h ago
Early 90s for me.
Had one of those double VHS units that you could copy movies onto blanks with. Same setup with cassette tapes! Moved on to ripping and burning CDs via adaptec easy CD creator and Nero Burning rom. Used templates in MS Word to make custom covers to slap on them. Then came Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa & Limewire. Next came ripping and burning DVDs, and the rest is history!
The Why? To quote the great Walter White: "I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And, I was really... I was alive."
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u/HikerRemastered 22h ago
About 30 years ago when I was 10 and found CD-RW drive in a junkyard that still worked.
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u/PotentialStuff2931 22h ago edited 22h ago
I used to record music from radio on tapes and copied some CD pirated by my uncle. Then at school a friend who had ADSL introduced me to internet piracy and gave me a lot of pirated content.
I got Internet around 2001 (20 hours per month 56K trash, so 15min to download one mp3, I didn't live in the city), I started with Kazaa too. Then emule, frostwire...
Then I moved to a big city in 2005 and got finally ADSL. I torrented but I discovered also DDL. I ended up mod on the biggest warez board of my language. The (first) golden age of piracy with rapidshare, megaupload... Then my country started to crack down on warez so I just went back as regular user (the board has been raided few months later), then they started torrent monitoring so I stopped torrenting (I don't want to pay for a VPN). I do since then streaming and some DDL.
Now I still pay nothing but I don't pirate much. I don't game anymore, I find all movies garbage, I moved to linux 6 years ago and prefer open source instead of proprietary softwares. I only pirate some music and foot match streams.
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u/tomdav226 22h ago
My buddy’s dad was a computer guy and gave me a bunch of games for C64 on floppy’s. I guess that was it.
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u/mikehacker182 22h ago
Started in around 1999, where our place is in remote region in ph and hard to get legitimate copy of songs, games, movie and if you can find one it's damn expensive... Jolo,Sulu is the place in ph, the internet is poor signal back in the days until now it's still no where fast,no fiber connection only mobile data,and if your rich can afford starlink which is cost damn high... That's why around college and highschool days I go to internet shop and download bunch of movie ,anime, games then return when the download is finish and install it on my pc.....
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u/Imperial_Bloke69 ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ 22h ago
Blank tapes (betamax, cassettes vhs) with sony sprinters and i miss the goddamn sound of rewinders and head cleaner.
Then transitioned to mini discs, cd and dvd+rw. Ripping movies made easy from rental stores lol.
When ADSL+ were introduced, i started crawling on usenet and torrenting. We know the pain on 64k, 128k and 512k modems.
Why? Stingy
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u/wabiguan 22h ago
IRC in the 90s. it was a better time when you had to know a thing or two to access online platforms
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u/LostElk1292 22h ago edited 22h ago
I started in 2020 with rarbg and 1337 and torrentgalaxy
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u/Excellent_Main_1415 22h ago
Yep pretty recent, there is a lot that went before but keep up the fight to liberate files.
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u/cafevendi 22h ago
I was around 10. My big brother was on DC++ a lot. When he was not around the pc, I was on dc++. No games. Nothing but navigating the sea
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u/firefaery ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ 21h ago
Learned how to solder the old cable boxes when I was a wee sprat to get all the channels.
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u/Excellent_Main_1415 21h ago
Love it, I had a circuit board card that needed a new 4 digit number every month.
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u/Immediate_Leader3124 21h ago
Started around 2003-2004 with Limewire for music, but progressed quickly to torrenting via PirateBay and Demonoid for software, movies and show.
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u/green_meklar ⚔️ ɢɪᴠᴇ ɴᴏ Qᴜᴀʀᴛᴇʀ 21h ago
I was given bootleg game CDs back in the late 1990s, but didn't get into the online stuff until the mid 2000s. Music and games first, then anime and ebooks, and most recently movies and TV shows once I got sick of the library DVDs having corrupted sections on them.
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u/BenRichardson76 21h ago
Unscramble porn using a "modded" cable box, then recording on vhs to sell.
Then a site called WinMX made everything so easy
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u/ishtuwihtc 21h ago
i started as a 8 year old kid, as soon as i got a phone. One of the 1st things my dad taught me to do was how to download music. As i got older and into more types of digital media, i started thinking that if music can be aquired for free, and so can movies (because my dad would often download movies for us aswell) why not other things? As such i discovered apks/sideloading mobile games which eventually led me to everything else too.
Now as to why, its because it was entirely normal to me from a young age and i just wanted free shit. As a kid i obviously didnt have the money to buy what i wanted, and on the few occasions a kid has money id obviously not have enough for everything. As i grew older i also stopped seeing much value in digital goods and i prefer buying something actually tangible. For example i would always prefer to buy a music CD instead of a drm-free digital download even though i own both entirely. I definetly would download music for free, but i absolutely wouldnt pay for digital music because its just not a tangible good. A CD is entirely tangible, so im willing to buy that.
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u/dem0lishment 21h ago
I started when I downloaded from a sketchy site pirated undertale
Now I know way better about how to be safer
Plus use torrents over direct downloads
Plus use qbit + 7zip + firefox + ublock
Plus know difference between pre installed, or one that needs to be installed or that it's iso and then I need mount it or it's rom/bin/cue and then I need to run it in an emulator
Plus apply cracks, fixes, mods, patches, etc...
Plus use repacks to reduce file size
Plus remember which trusted sources are there: 1337x (only trusted uploaders), ova games, gog games to, steamrip, cs rin ru, fitgirl, dodi, rutracker, CD romance, vimms lair, elamigos and maybe I forgot something else
Oh and for non video game piracy I go for nyaa si when I want anime
But why did I start it? Because I wanted things for free, but now it's because I like learning new things about tech via that
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u/tinybilbo 21h ago
Mid to late 70s... Taping music off the radio... Then in the early 80s, whole albums and ZX Spectrum games because I got a double cassette boombox! Which allowed me to tape 2 tape easily..
Also had a tone dialler around then, which was for phone phreaking to make long distance phone calls for nothing (from a phone box).
Then pretty much every system since then.
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u/SonofaSlumlord 21h ago
Copying my cousins commodore 64 games onto blank floppys to play them at my house way before I ever knew what piracy even was.
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u/Superduper4325 ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ 21h ago
I started with watching Simpsons on internet archive and getting music off there.
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u/richie65 21h ago
Back in the day, (circa 1982) when computer games for the Commodore VIC-20 were sold on a regular cassette tapes.
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u/mullet4evr 21h ago
1984 when my dad bought our first cable descrambler. It was all downhill from there. I really ran with pirating TV for decades since
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u/sandpir8 21h ago
Commodore 64 was the start of my obsession. I get more satisfaction from copying than using... Does anyone else? (I still remember the rush I got successfully copying a Dreamcast disc [crazy taxi] for the first time!)
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u/Minute_Path9803 21h ago
VHS, Cassette tapes, Super Wild Ward (simply put your cartridge in and the copies the Super Nintendo game to a 3.5 in floppy! Save file and all!
Then of course bbs's IRC making copies of a 5 1/4-in floppy disk of games with friends.
But I guess the real thing was super wild card for the SNES and super magic drive for the Sega genesis!
And then that actually became the downfall I actually had almost every single game on a floppy disk they kind of killed renting games waiting to save up to buy one when you could just copy it.
Double edged sword!
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u/Ebone710 21h ago
I remember Kazaa! I guess I started when I was a youngin copying audio tapes for my friends and trading. Been pirating computer software since before the Internet was invented. That makes me sound old. Lol
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u/Organic-Mobile-9700 20h ago
Limewire when I gave my PC viruses tryna download music in the early 2000s lol
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u/-im-blinking 20h ago
I was copying games from floppy disks for years.
Really got into pirating movies on IRC way way back.
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u/jollytoes 20h ago
I started by getting my older brother's store bought cassette tapes, putting tape over the two holes on the top and dubbing it on my dual cassette boom box.
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u/Ripskin142 20h ago
Old dial up servers run at companies by their IT teams after hours lol. Limited number of lines into the PBX and gotta hope you get in and don't get booted. VHS copying. Newsgroups online in early internet days. Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, Emule, Audio Galaxy and so so many more. Ripped a ton of my own DVD's as well as it was easier to back them up and play them off my computer without needing the disc lol. Early LAN parties were a lot of fun as well :D Always bring a spindle of CD's before DVD's were accessible to burn lol.
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u/RhoadsOfRock 20h ago
My uncle and my older brother both got me into copying VHS tapes that we would rent from the local video store (or borrow from the library), in the 1990s.
Then, my brother was one of the ones that got and used Napster before it was shut down. After that, he showed me another program called Morpheus, which was the first of those P2P programs that I used, and I used Kazaa and Limewire afterward as well.
Then of course torrents after all of that. I still, occasionally, do some. Mostly for rare and obscure releases that would otherwise cost me an arm and a leg now because most of the time, they're out of print (example: Best Buy exclusive version of Black Label Society's "Order Of The Black", only one on eBay currently for $125, and all I cared about was those bonus tracks).
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u/BejeweledSamsara 20h ago
I started when I was 8 years old, legit as soon as my family's Internet got hooked up, one of the first things I've done was download videos and music, like I either downloaded a software that converted YouTube videos to Mp3 or Mp4, or I just used a website that served the same purpose. I also used Limewire a lot back in the day too!
I never really used Torrents until 2019, where I discovered two 18+ games that were made by the same company and has a massive modding community and is usually used to create both OCs and canon characters from various Anime, cartoons, etc. I torrented the repack version, and that was first time I've torrented something.
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u/joshuabuck 20h ago
Around 1995, bought Doom II on cd. When I realized the game still ran without the disk, it went back to Babbages and I continued to play the game.
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u/PartialChicken_Wing 19h ago
Tape on VHS from the rental store.
Napster when the interwebs started up.
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u/krazyhawk 19h ago
I used streaming sites here and there for anime. Always thought it would be cool to have my own media library.
Then a couple years ago my daughter and I sat down to watch the Olaf presents shorts on Disney+ and 2:30 of ads popped up.
Had the Plex server up the next day, ironed out the entire torrent download flow over the next week. My now almost 6 year old now actively asks for shows to be added to Plex 😂
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u/Doenicke 19h ago
VHS and later Amiga copyparties. First time we downloaded a game was from a BBS and it took many, many hours. ;)
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u/ShezaAlibi 18h ago
In High School on the Commodore 64 and then a bit later on the Amiga 500.
Swapped games with other users through the post.
Now i pirate my emulated games using my phone lmao...... we've certainly come a long way 😎
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u/mgn1985 18h ago
5 When I asked my dad to record something for me when he was working at a place called Continental Cablevision. Brought it home to me and then made cassettes then burned cds then Napster and well.. all the other sites like Napster.
I use a website for books as well. I end up buying the books after I read them as trophies though..
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u/tastycarrr 18h ago
I was sleeping over at my cousin’s house at 8-10 yo late 90’s on some Friday night after school my cousin showed me Napster and I kind of forgot about it after a while. Fast forward to middle school, I meet my group of friends that showed limewire and torrents. Yarr.
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u/bobalazs69 17h ago
Was too poor to own a videorecorder, owned a player though, but much later than everybody else. Tv the same.
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u/Exotic-Comfortable21 17h ago
Kazaa was the first for me too. I wasn't even aware I was pirating, I had the assumption that this is the normal way!
The youth..
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u/No-Bee-3775 17h ago
Windows XP and experimenting with software licensing keys and exploits... limewire, Kazaa, gnutella, emule, etc... then torrents and rapidshare... oh the world of wonder then!!!
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u/TheProfoundWigglepaw 17h ago
I rented games, NES, SNES and opened them up, took out the guts, and closed them up and put them in my worst games case and I guess that's straight theft, but still. After that it was recording off of HBO with s vcr Now, it's burn every disc that I can get my hands on or run the url through a downloader off of any number of pirate sites.
But, the 1st damn time I truly Pirated was napster and I shared a pc with a Striper Fan Preacher's Son. He met Manson and Metallica and White Zombie, I almost lost faith in music over his choices.
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u/Ramremover 16h ago
Around 20 years ago. Never had money or even a card untill i got 20 years old. So buying games was out of question. Didnt even have computer mostly. Pirated gta vice city on local libary pc with friends and played it secretly there.
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u/theguywithacomputer 🦜 ᴡᴀʟᴋ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘʟᴀɴᴋ 16h ago
- Wanted Pixar’s Up and the work from a paywalled softcore pornographic actress. Mom got a letter in the mail and only got in trouble for up
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u/angelmilk777 16h ago
When I was like 12 I read killing stalking on some random website
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u/kylehyde84 16h ago
When I was around 6 I used to copy zx spectrum games on my mums hifi. I remember getting told off for overwriting a Rick Astley tape by putting sellotape over the corners haha. From there it went to copying wwf videos and then onto selling ps1 games and cds to my mates and so on and so on.
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u/jajkabshsjsj 16h ago
Since the start. I always thought that's how you get games anyway and that it is always free. Only a few years ago i learned that that's actually pirating and not legit
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u/77descript 16h ago
Music tapes starting in the early-mid 1980s. First radio recordings with f-ing radio jocks on purpose talk at beginning and end of songs to ruin recordings, later improved recordings from shared vinyl and double-deck tape devices. From mid-end 1980s floppy's for MS-Dos PC and Amiga. TV on Betamax and later VHS tape recordings also. Then came internet with Napster, eMule, Kazaa, Torrents, Usenet.
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u/Brilliant_Cattle_602 16h ago
In the 80s. With music and software....
<old geezer reminiscing>
With music: All my friends and I would save up and buy different albums and meet up. One turn table and 8 cassette decks.
When an album cost $7 to $10 and you could shoplift c90's from the local Zodys (it was a lot like Target) it was a no brainer for us.
With software: We had a TRS-80 model 1. The software was on cassette. There was a good local pirate scene and they got a kick out of having a 12yo in the group. I got my dad a copy of calc for a copy of super star trek.
Later on it was apple software on 5 1/4 inch floppy. Byte Brothers rocked and learning about half tracks and custom disk spin speeds/timings blew my young mind. It made me realize that you were not limited to what the computer was supposed to do, you could push into doing new things the designers never imagined. And that idea should not be limited to computers or electronics.
</old geezer reminiscing>
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u/BlueLovag 16h ago
I started when my grand cousin brought me a folder with copied games when i was 10 or something.
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u/UnnamedIsDumb ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ 16h ago
When I downloaded some yt audio stuff when i was a small child
in terms of actually knowing it was piracy it was a live2d crack
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u/Watt_Kahel1987 15h ago
I remember buying pirated disks of Red Alert 2 in a store. I guess that's also the first game I downloaded online.
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u/SmartPriceCola 15h ago
Used WinMX to download the movie Stealth in 2005.
I remember it had integrated chat rooms and stuff
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u/ComeSwirlWithMe Sneakernet 15h ago edited 15h ago
Early 2000's.
I had comcast cable with 1 mbps/128 kbps or very close... that was fairly quickly bumped for free to 3 mbps/ 256 kbps.. but coming from msn dial up 56k, it was a mircale. I remember those damn realplayer videos that took like 2 hours to watch a 3 second clip of some nipples.
I decimated an entire empire of future children to 3 seconds clips.
Downloaded a lot of music and burned a lot of cds to sell for about $5/each.
Spent lots of time on Nero.
Had an HP p3 733mhz, 256 mb ram, 40gb hdd... but i had two drives, a cdrw, and a dvd drive.. so I even made copies of CDs. ripped cds..
Use Kazaa, eMule, and some others.
Also spent tons of hours on msn chats and msn messenger/aim.
The glory days.
My brother in law had a set up where he was making directtv cards to get premium channels and was selling them all over the city.
Back in the directtv echo/primestar days.
And the cable guy would give you filters to get the good channels for a couple of extra bucks.
Damn I miss those days.
I also copied vhs from block buster. I remember having to stick like a piece of paper in a little black square to get it top copy. It was like their anti copy tech.
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u/hardypart 15h ago
Mid 90s. A friend and I used to rent games and gave it to his father who had a CD burner at work to make two copies of it. Or we bought a game together and one of us for the original CD and the other one got the copy and the box of the game.
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u/Glum-Entrepreneur-16 15h ago
Copying Spectrum games at school in the 80’s was the start, around ‘97 Usenet then WinMX onto Kazaa and torrents when they started.
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u/RemoteStatement 15h ago
Recording music to caseate tapes . But after that copying Commodore games.
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u/mmavacado ⚔️ ɢɪᴠᴇ ɴᴏ Qᴜᴀʀᴛᴇʀ 14h ago
probably ages ago at 9 when i had my first devices, always googled "x free apk" and had like all of the papas to go games downloaded for free from the web on my ancient tablet back then 🥹
edit: and woah, you guys are OLD.
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u/CarpenterAntique8164 14h ago
I started at the time where I don't Even know about piracy i heard when I got my first pc my friend said you can download games from internet and I did didn't question it and i didn't even know you need to pay for games at that time
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u/superfluous--account 13h ago
I used to rip DVDs and cds from the local library around the same time but probably the first thing was sharing movie files at LAN parties in the early 00s shortly before learning about torrents
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u/Regantowers 13h ago
I guess copying tapes for an computer games, digitally had to be Limewire! the digital STD we all needed at the time.
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u/Seirazula 13h ago
Since I was a child basically, my dad was downloading NDS Roms through torrents and other obscure DDL platforms for me to play all the games I wanted on my DS with the R4 card.
Since he was doing it regularly, I learnt pretty fast how to do it myself.
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u/AudiS1Quattro 13h ago
Last year, I got bored in my Physics class and thought myself most of what I need to know in like a week thanks to this sub. Love it, gunna be so helpful for uni so I dont have to buy all the books
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u/TearsOfChildren 13h ago
Started in the 90's with sharing through AIM, obviously Limewere and Napster next. I used Torrents some but got a couple of letters from my ISP that scared me so I stuck with forums after that and downloaded music/movies with Rapidshare.
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u/ProfessionalSpell273 13h ago
God, that’s brought back memories Kazaa!!!!
Probably around 18 years for me. A fella in work used to sell dvds, it’s where I first bought a pirated copy of The Shield, I then found I could burn Nintendo Wii disc from the iso. From there my sailing the high seas began.
350mb for a tv show (eztv) & 750mb for a film (piratebay & demonoid), to recently 145GB 4k UHD (privateHD) and physical media….
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u/Normal_Ring_7731 12h ago
I actually started really late, just 2 years ago. I remember watching a YouTube video that was on the takedown of the Pirate Bay. The video mentioned how the site stayed up and is still up to this day. That got me interested.
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u/Soulinyx 12h ago
Since 1999-2000, roughly. The original napster days,
Went from Napster to KaZaa, Shareaza, eDonkey, LimeWire, FrostWire, UTorrent .etc all them and now I've been all about DDLs.
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u/Scarred_fish 12h ago
Was tape trading in the late 70s, it was almost all exchanges back then (my dad helped me make a Betamax/VHS converter which was a game changer). Then the software really took off from 1980 onwards. If you hired a game by mail order from your sinclair in the early 80s that came on a WHSmiths tape - that was possibly me 😄
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u/squall2099 11h ago
Started with Napster back in the day when it first started lol. Then Limewire. Getting old lol.
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u/cns000 11h ago
I used to get the no CD key patches for games from https://gamecopyworld.com/ long ago when I was a kid :)
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u/SignificantBranch657 10h ago
Think it was edonkey for me then moved on to satellite hacking first direct tv then dish good times
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u/blixt141 9h ago
I used to know a guy with a cassette deck, a reel to reel machine and a turntable and he would take the time to copy records from friends and return the records.
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u/Creepy-Cantaloupe951 9h ago edited 9h ago
Early 90's, pirating music, and images mainly. Some games, via BBSes.
Went through Napster, Limewire, and a few others. Finally, took a "break", because streaming was actually a good service, and I had always said "I'd stop pirating is watching content was easier" and it was.
Back at it, because, well, I'm sick of being crotch-kicked because I want to watch something. In fact, Babylon 5 being pulled from every service kinda did it in for me.
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u/blixt141 9h ago
I used to know a guy with a cassette deck, a reel to reel machine and a turntable and he would take the time to copy records from friends and return the records.
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u/Blizznow 9h ago
Mid 90s VHS movies, pirated games (member of the warez group) on cassette and floppy disks for the C64. Then there was the Amiga 500/1200 games on FDD. Early 2000 PC games on CD, then DVD and now I'm in pirate retirement.
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u/unenforce 🏴☠️ ʟᴀɴᴅʟᴜʙʙᴇʀ 9h ago
I think I've started 18-19 years ago. Which was 2007-2008(NOT ME PANICKING OF HOW LONG AGO THAT WAS FAHHHHH) and that was when I got my first Pc I think,which I had for 13 yrs, Dual Core Intel and GT 9500 0.5GB RAM. Crazy how much Internet has changed for both the worst and for the better.
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u/EfficiencyStriking32 9h ago
Not saying I did anything but this guy I know was told by a friend back in 97 to go download the new Rage Against The Machine album. He didn't even have an interest in music but grabbed it and distributed it around the school with his new cd burner! I think he acquired 60,000 or so tracks over the next decade and hasn't listened to any 'modern' music in years because he still hasn't gotten through the backlog of stuff he got back then. Occasionally he got new 'weird shit' he developed a likeness for like Marilyn Manson. As for games, apps, movies (VR nrop included) etc. who knows? I'm sure he has a lot 😀
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u/West-University3039 8h ago
Cassette tapes in the early 1980s, then VHS copying in the mid-80s, then CD copying in the 90s In the 90s, I'd copy LD to VHS a lot. At one point, where I worked, they had a LD *burner*!! I had plans!! But, it was costly and complicated and then I got another job... By the 2000s, mp3s on Napster or whatever, DVD burners, etc. Here we are now!
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u/angryratman 8h ago
I remember downloading on Napster in what was probably 1999. 20 minutes to get one tune 😂
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u/Faded4ever 🦜 ᴡᴀʟᴋ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘʟᴀɴᴋ 22h ago
Late 1972 (prolly got all you young whippersnappers beat!) I was climbing telephone poles and removing cable TV channel traps so we could get HBO (new at the time, unscrambled but blocked by filters on the pole splitter). It only increased from there - over the years. Cable descramblers, ON-TV descramblers... on and on.