Piracy then and now...
 

When I was in high school, in the mid 90's... piracy was this hush-hush thing that was kept a secret because people were afraid of the consequences. I remember going over to the house of a big pirate, and he had an entire dresser filled with CD's. I expressed an interest in seeing what he had, and he flat-out refused to show me... for fear that I was someone that could jeopardize his operation. The only way you could get what you wanted was to hit the #warez IRC channels and schmooze with the mods to let you have some sort of access to their stuff. And it was only ever accessible via an FTP address, and there was never a domain associated with it. But they'd never just let you right in, and they'd always be suspicious of everyone... nobody wanted to get caught doing this sort of thing. Everyone knew damn well what the consequences could be. Nobody was backing it up as some sort of "legit" thing. Everyone was treading very carefully, and never being brazen about it. We knew damn well we didn't have the right to be doing what we did.

So I'm wondering... when did it go from being this super-secret seedy underground thing that happened in the dark corners of the internet, to being this "out and proud" thing that a lot of people now think is an exercise of freedom of speech? The whole "in your face" attitude and commercialization, and creation of the "piracy industry" is quite a change from the way it used to be.

These aren't the pirates that I used to know... that's for sure.

Internet made it easy, they got used to it, and then the ideology was born to justify why what they're doing it right.

In 90's, piracy in USA and Europe was different.
We didn't have any things like FBI warnings before any movie on VHS', etc, or at least I never saw such a thing.

In Poland, access to pirated content was easy.
I remember buying pirate music cassettes, vinyls, or software for C64 on cassettes and Amiga diskettes. And everything you could buy... on local market.
You just had to look for guys with cassettes/other stuff on blankets which can be easily taken when the police come.

Btw, even wondered how to copy a vinyl?
http://www.synthgear.com/2010/diy/ho...-vinyl-record/

I have lot of such things in house.
Vinyls of such bands like Metallica, Deep Purple, Led Zeppeling, etc. was very hard to get and expensive. Thanks to piracy we could afford great music easily.

I was heavily involved in piracy.

BBS, Newsgroups, IRC

Europeans really drove piracy to new levels.

Mostly to get their hands on American content they couldn't otherwise.

Invention of the mp3 > Napster > Limewire +iPod > Faster broadband > ThePirateBay + Torrents > Rapidshare + other HTTP hosts

These highlights are the key ones, in my opinion, that spurred piracy massive public growth.

We all know that.
You're clear as rain water.

Just reading the way you attack AK is enough...

One word. MONEY!

Problem was before everything was moderated and now it's "I didn't upload the content, users did"

I would guess that most piracy of American produced content of all sorts happens outside of the US.

Globalization and hooking up the rest of the world to the internet is what happened.

The parallels to porn are eerie. It used to be that porn was also "hush hush"... You know, plain brown packages, seedy back rooms of "legit" video rental fronts, etc etc

The fact is the Internet made many otherwise 'hush hush' activities easier, more accessible, and more efficient. Piracy, porn, and many other activities...

It seems that there has been a shift in morality as well.

I was taught to not take other people's stuff without asking or paying for it.

These days parents teach their kids how to find and download free stuff.

Those of us in the Spanking Community are plagued by a couple of open boards that are illegally offering up our copyrighted material for free. At least the US government got Megupload and make it somewhat more difficult for these thieves.

I can understand how those boards can annoy you and cause problems and I am not making light of that, but when I read the phrase "spanking community" I immediately envisioned some guy walking down the street of a small town and everyone he passes smacks him on the ass.

yeah just a simple combination of ease-to-pirate combined with lack of consequences has led to the shift in values. How do you tell kids something is wrong when there are no consequences. kids see musicians & actors still make their money, think nobody is getting hurt.

I noticed most of my content being ripped and shared the few times I offered trials.

Money trumps morality.

I was thinking that as well ! :1orglaugh

Yes. It now costs nothing to very little to be a pirate or access pirated material. Before the Internet high speeds and huge servers at low costs. The costs were too high. Before the Internet most piracy had to be paid for.

A pirated VHS required a blank tape which of any quality and in low numbers retail would cost $2. Then a second VCR to record one to the other, cost $300 approx. Plus cables to link. Cassettes were easier with a double deck cassette player, still blank tapes were bought. Quality of either was poor, taking it off the retail VHS or cassette. The big operations needed investment. There was the risk of getting caught selling it in a market or shop.

The early Internet was slow, hosting expensive and people on dial up or slow connections were not downloading/uploading full HD scenes. Remember the sizes of videos 12 years ago?

Now it costs so little to have huge servers, broadband home connections and a computer with so much hard drive it's a wonder how we survived in the early day. We now have more RAM than we had HD. Downloading a full site takes a few days or hours with some. Storing it on a computer or external HD. And having loads of downloads all for the cost of a premium membership. :Oh crap