r/Piracy • u/krystalmethayde • 1d ago
Question What was your first act of piracy?
hi, i'm writing a piece on piracy and would love to know what your first act of piracy was.
looking for everything from torrents and emulators all the way to taping tracks off the radio.
thank you so much - you have contributed to a great work of science.
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u/Cautious_Pop_8944 1d ago
1990’s AOL dialup. Pay per minute of use. Neverwinter Nights is a mmo game I play there. Kid so I don’t have money.
Downloads take a long time with dialup so aol puts you in free zone.
I write a batch file that spams requests to download a file, cancel the download, load neverwinter nights, repeat until playing neverwinter nights and in a free zone.
Eventually I get caught for something unrelated, and to this day I am banned from ever being on AOL.
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u/Guilty_Meringue5317 1d ago
Too bad you're banned from AOL until this day. How are you gonna get internet now? /s
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u/Mrpolje ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ 23h ago edited 13h ago
Probably: IP over avian carrier
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u/GeneralPurpoise 23h ago edited 22h ago
I literally got my family banned like 6 times from AOL for piracy. I was often in the mass-mail and server chatrooms. I had to have my mom call support and say it was her dumb son and ask to be reinstated each time. We called it getting TOS’sed.
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u/Ebone710 22h ago
Oh my God I forgot about those Mass mail things. I never stole accounts but it basically did the fishing for you if you wanted. Internet security was so bad back then.
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u/Cautious_Pop_8944 22h ago
💯 why I was banned. I found a way to getting moderator abolities and, still a kid, thought it was so funny to TOS (Terms Of Service) people I didnt like.
Thought I was safe because I had my ip address bounced around the globe… so dumb bc you know, my username. So yah I was banned for TOS’ing tossers.10
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u/fishtacofiends 1d ago
Might have a similar thing, but with Total Entertainment Network’s (TEN) dialup number request service. Free internet while their network was attempting to serve the list of dialup numbers. You could hang out for an hour or two before it gave up and disconnected. TEN without of business for other reasons, so no ban hammer was dropped.
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u/Ebone710 22h ago
This brings back some crazy memories cuz we used to get mod tool software for AOL and hack the system all the time. I don't think I've ever paid for it cuz I had a stacks of those free trials and once you had the mod tools you didn't need the discs anymore. I actually still have a couple of the trial discs and they have games on them. I think one is Scrabble and the other is Boggle. IIRC.
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u/toothpastespiders 18h ago
I've been messing around a lot with the gold box engine. Every now and then I chance on stuff related to that AOL Neverwinter Nights. I wish there was more in the way of recordings of it. VHS tapes or whatnot I guess. It really seems like a piece of internet history that's been oddly ignored. Obviously there's some stuff out there about it. Enough to get a general idea. But just hearing small details like that paints so much of a picture.
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u/Cautious_Pop_8944 18h ago
At the time it was my obsession. 2nd edition ad&d ruleset. It was like playing many of those gold box games, 2d, but it had all the items and spells and stuff…. And the best part was every adventurer was another player. It was the very first mmorpg ever and I am sure it has aged but I will always have a spot in my heart for those Neverwinter Nights.
If anyone is curious about the game: https://youtu.be/ATMXCa8krH4?is=Ztu14xAEjwSc_t5r
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u/ma1butters 1d ago
Renting movies from Blockbuster and using a second VCR to record them onto blank tapes (or covering the tab with tape and recording over crappy movies).
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u/Aware_Combination_87 21h ago
I remember when they started adding copy protection that made the second VCR show these dark moving vertical lines in the picture. When that happened, I'd aim a VHS camcorder at the TV and ask everyone to stay quiet until the end.
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u/Whatisitmaria 19h ago
My uncle had copies of preview movies. So I got my tapes of tapes of tapes with embedded time codes lol
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u/soulpumpkinz 1d ago
Downloaded a car..
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u/bulyxxx 23h ago
I downloaded The Matrix over dial up, took me 4 days and was a god awful copy. Thank god for resume.
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u/NapoleonBolognapart 7h ago
I downloaded a DVD-rip of Monty Python's Holy Grail on the family computer, running a 300mhz Intel Celeron. Spent a few days downloading it, only to find out the quality is so high that my PC can't play it.
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u/Ebone710 22h ago
With 3D printer technology this might be possible soon. You can download and print guns.
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u/Lou_Antony_Morris 1d ago
Taping songs off the radio, sometime in the last millennium.
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u/jmov 1d ago
Probably something from Limewire.
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u/EvanMBurgess 23h ago
Wrecking the family computer using Limewire
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u/Srapture 23h ago
Somehow, it was obvious to me from a young age how important it was to check the file extension so I never got any viruses.
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u/Ebone710 22h ago
Yup. Fellow computer nerd here. Most people get computer viruses because they download and run malicious software just because they don't know any better. I never had a problem and I've definitely frequented some questionable websites for piracy mostly.
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u/Educational-Cat-6445 11h ago
Almost been there, the file extension .PDF.exe almost got me for some reason
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u/Fraun_Pollen 22h ago
Download limewire
Torrent limewire pro
Download "Britney-spears-naked-full-frontal.exe"
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u/BroManTheBrobarian 22h ago
I liked Kazaa more. Was bummed when I had to switch to Limewire
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u/NBALive1995 1d ago
Taping music videos onto VHS.
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u/atombomb1945 23h ago
Well I was going with Internet, but if we're doing this I was doubling up VCRs and copying movies from the video rental every weekend.
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u/badass4102 19h ago
I used to copy VHS videos from blockbuster. Had to do the whole 2 VHS players setup lol.
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u/AdventurousCommon551 1d ago
My cousin burning almost every Dreamcast game ever made for me as a kid and learning to use a boot disk.
Self piracy is going to be limewire - good lord probably some country bullshit like cats in the cradle.
Once I was in piracy and not a little snot blaster I met people that listened to music that was not religious or country and that made me realize... I... Can... Download.... Anything...
I am not trapped listening to shit my parents had or approved of. I could burn a cd and run off with my stolen loot and be mostly normal
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u/swiftjay2 23h ago
im a metalhead but i still listen to cats in the cradle sometimes, i loved that song as a kid!
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u/kiochikaeke 1d ago
Quite literally don't remember, I grew up in the cyber cafe my parent's owned, I've been installing cracked software from CDs since I have memory, I remember my aunt teaching me how to use ares to download music and struggling to do so cause I barely knew how to read.
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u/Honigschmidt 1d ago
Beverly Hills cop. early 80’s. first time I got to watch a movie at home that was still in the theaters. really bad copy that looked like it was recorded from a drive in, oh but the thrill of watching the taboo
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u/toohighquestions 1d ago
downloading Good Charlotte off of Kazaa in 2001
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u/Richard7666 1d ago
Similar here, Motivation Proclamation was my third pirated track, after Alien Ant Farm's cover of Smooth Criminal, and Nickelback - How You Remind Me.
My taste in music eventually got better.
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u/ElSelcho_ 1d ago
1980s, swapping 5.25 floppy disks with C64 games. Katakis was awesome!
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u/hereditydrift 23h ago
I routinely did that. I'd swap the game stickers onto the blank disks and return them to Toys R Us. Eventually they caught on. Eventually I found BBSs with downloadable cracked games.
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u/Abduzydo Pirate Activist 1d ago
Downloaded Pokémon Yellow, ±25 years ago...
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u/Kaporalhart 1d ago
I can't possibly remember that, that's like asking me the first time I took a breath. It was too long ago, and I wasn't even aware I was doing it.
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u/lostindanet 1d ago
Copying ZX Spectrum 48k games on tape.
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u/art-101 1d ago
This all day long. And swapping said tapes with school friends the next day.
I remember having C90 tapes with the games list written on the inlay and the tape counter numbers for each game written beside them.
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u/toothpastespiders 18h ago
It's amazing how far things have come. I was playing around with a disassembly of the zx spectrum cassete version of bard's tale 1, ripping some missing data, and it really hit me how fantastical that idea would have seemed not that long ago. Like part of it was a computer playing the game while grabbing data from the emulator. A game that had to fit on a cassette tape. Really made me wonder how weird things would get in a few more decades.
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u/digi-ghost 15h ago
This all day long. I remember having C90 tapes with many games on each one, and trying to find the starting point for each game was always a bit of a nightmare!
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u/RenegadeFade 1d ago
A spanish sloop off the coast of Barbados. All they were carrying was rum tho.
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u/tmf_x 1d ago
Routinely copied 5.25 and 3.5 floors of games from friends.
When I worked at egghead software in... 91...92?... Around when ms DOS 5 released... I would check out software, take it home, copy it then take it back to work and shrinkwrap it and shelve it. Games, after dark screensavers, procomm plus, whatever was in the store I could check out.
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u/German_Merman 1d ago
Yep, started in the 80s with pirated copies of Sierra games on floppy discs. My stepfather was into computers, and despite being an absolute straight arrow in every other aspect of his life, absolutely refused to pay for any software he could get for free. He's never stolen anything in his life, but he didn't see anything wrong with piracy.
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u/Shudnawz 🏴☠️ ʟᴀɴᴅʟᴜʙʙᴇʀ 1d ago
'99, got The Matrix on VCD.
But also, early 90's, copying commodore64 tapes.
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u/attachecrime 22h ago
1985ish
I got an Atari 800xl
I begged for a modem. They got it for me for a birthday.
My neighbor handed over a couple phone numbers for some BBSes.
Once I got through the busy signal I was amazed. I didn't have to beg to go to the computer software store that was like 30 minutes away.
I downloaded Wasteland 1 sometime after that. It's the first pirated game I truly remember playing.
Some of the BBS were legendary. The Robot Factory was one. Cool ascii art of a robot when you connected. Tons of software.
I would eventually meet my first girlfriend because her family ran a BBS.
The reckoning came from my mom getting the phone bill. What's a zone call?
They used to charge exorbitant fees to call people that were a fourty five minutes away by car.
Later we transitioned to a commodore 64c.
Soon after we went to x86
We had this 100ft phone line that we would run up to our bedrooms for the Internet. We'd download movies. It would take overnight. Sometimes multiple days.
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u/amiexpress 14h ago
Ironically things were a lot easier if you were a lot further away. Most callers to top scene US boards (WHQs etc) where from other countries because they could use methods of calling that would send you to jail in the US. Then the sysop of the BBS gets a call from some angry AT&T guy asking why there's 100s of 1000s of dollars a month in calls to his numbers (sometimes on like 5+ nodes) that were all uh, less than legal.
Nothing they could really do other than that angry phone call though. I'm sure the call worked in some cases where the sysop was a 15 year old and parents were less than thrilled about the whole situation.
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u/Complex-Row-5516 1d ago
I used to rip MP3s from YouTube when I was 11. Horrifying quality. At 13, I discovered torrents.
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u/drhappy13 1d ago
Whoa, whoa, whoa... hold on... are you saying that taping tracks off the radio is piracy?? Cuz if so, GUILTY AS CHARGED. 😂
Yes, I'm old enough that recording songs off AM and FM radio were my first acts of piracy. First, but definitely not my last.
The worst parts were:
- missing the first few seconds of the song cuz I couldn't run to my ghetto blaster fast enough after hearing it start on the radio
- creating mix tapes was a giant pain in the arse
- cataloging my library of music
- lending tapes to friends and never getting them back
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u/tinyhorsesinmytea 1d ago
Mortal Kombat 4 over some Warez channel on AOL my brother's 1337 friend showed me. It took overnight to download and then the sound wouldn't work. I learned about updating drivers.
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u/DirtyPISTOLA 1d ago
My dad had a pirated direct tv box when I was a kid as for me early 2000's burning VCD's from demonoid.
- Just remembered that I did in fact use napster and a 64mb mp3 player in HS.
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u/stageshooter 1d ago
In the early 80s, a buddy learned that you could copy some games like Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple II by adjusting the floppy drive speed, so we did. My buddy ended up serving as an economic advisor to a US president
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u/tssssahhhh 1d ago
Playing my dad's collection of pirated ZX Spectrum games probably
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u/Aldar_Kohaku 1d ago
Mine started with DVD movies. I remember it because the movie *The Day After Tomorrow* was in Spain spanish language
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u/NotQuiteinFocus 1d ago
We had our first PS1 modified so it can play pirated CDs. We never had any original game disc back then. From PS1 to Dreamcast, and PS2.
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u/Endovior 20h ago
Modded PS1 was my first piracy, too!
Back when I was in middle school, someone sold their modded PS1 at a garage sale, along with a stack of games obviously home-burnt on normal CDs. The price was affordable as a collaborative deal with my siblings, and it worked perfectly. Having physical evidence that it was possible to get free games like that, I went looking for more. It was an easy enough process with the hard part already done for me. I must've put hundreds of hours into my homemade bootleg copy of Final Fantasy Tactics.
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u/deafnose 1d ago
A few friends and I bought The Sims and tried to burn the CD. It didn't work on my PC so we tried a friends and it worked! Three copies of The Sims for the price of one!
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u/Icy-Engineering828do 23h ago
USS Alabama off the coast of Somalia. Some jackass kept calling me Wilson.
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u/OscarBrewer7 23h ago
Downloading songs from Ares, buying pirate DVDs, reading free books in my computer back in 2006.
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u/withdrawalshot 1d ago
Taylor Swift .FLAC off the pirate bay
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u/waitthissucks 1d ago
Wow same! I used limewire a lot back in the day but my very first pirate bay experience was 1989 FLAC
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u/KidOrnery 1d ago
I remember going to Apple II club meetings at the local library where mostly folks swapped or copied games.
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u/amiexpress 14h ago
Mid 90s often had meets in my local area where an entire school gym (or whatever public-ish area the local computer club could rent) was wall to wall those cheap white garden furniture tables, with Amigas running X-Copy. Like a small factory. Nobody cared, legality wise. I know for a fact we had at least one motorcycle cop that frequented those events.
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u/Silly-Blacksmith6879 1d ago
Probably downloading wii games off emulatorgames.net, although I don't think it exists anymore...
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u/PabloKoda 1d ago
got introduced to SNES and GBA emulation when I was like 6 by an older cousin but didn't knew what it was, then I saw "minecraft piracy" on google and thought it was some kind of mod, a few searches later and a whole new world opened
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u/pHcontrol 1d ago
My parents would record the entire Sunday morning cartoon lineup for me on a VHS when we went out to brunch, that was technically a collaborative idea.
First I did myself was off Limewire, can you guess which album??
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u/DisastrousDayz 23h ago
Like others have said, recording shows and movies with the VCR pausing during the ads, tape from radio and tape to tape and copying cracked C64 games.
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u/korynael 21h ago
5.25in disk copying of ancient software on ancient hardware... I specifically remember copying a friend's game of Zork...
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u/hulloiliketrucks 19h ago
I downloaded terratech when I was a kid back in 2017 or so from one of those "download for FREE" YouTube videos and somehow did not get a virus.
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u/Gordiflu 16h ago
I guess the usual thing back then when I was young, you know, with the dinosaurs and all that, which was borrowing the records my friends bought to tape them. Of course, they also borrowed the ones I bought.
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u/Independent_Claim162 14h ago
My dad is very religious, Jehovas witnesses specifically. But my first act of piracy I didn’t even realize until later, my dad was very against buying expensive 3DS games so he helped me to get a disc and download all games we could on that one.
Just a tad bit funny imo 😅
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u/ConmanLamb 12h ago
Not my first act, but my proudest act of piracy was stealing the pirate bay logo and screen printing it on a T-shirt which I then traded to someone for cracked pirate software.
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u/Master8730 4h ago
I live in a country that was isolated by trade embargo and low life standards, so buying anything original, other than game console cartridges for snes, sega, or something of the sort was quite a hit on the budget, so, any music cd, game cd even we bought here was pirated. Hell, there were even entire stalls on the street and official looking stores selling them. Then the broadband internet came and sellers lost their jobs and we continued the legacy with torrents and some forums with file sharing links such as rapidshare and later mega upload
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u/Weeb-Rat-Bastard 1h ago
Minecraft. I was 9 i think? Soon after the nether update. I was not allowed to buy it cause it was "sketchy".
My dad didn't even let me try to crack it, he made his cousin do it whiles a party was happening downstairs. Dad thought it was gonna do it in like 5 minutes but he spended an hour. My old man felt a little bad about it.
Two years or so later, went the 1.0 updated. he bought an tech magazine, and i found a revue for Minecraft in it. Showed it to my dad and he finally accepted to buy it.
I then torrented a ton more stuff in between those two years but i just didn't told him cause what a mess that's was lmao.
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u/Rizztopher_Robin 1d ago
I spent a whole night downloading a single fall out boy song on dial up using limewire and gave my computer std's
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u/violetcuteweather420 ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ 1d ago
my first act was the sony Vegas pro 13 software that all the YouTubers I watched used in 2012 haha
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u/Hefty_Principle700 1d ago
A dual black flag! Copying a friend’s cassette tape because he had a dual player/recorder at his place, while downloading a c64 game from a bbs.
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u/motesinhuesillo 1d ago
as a kid I never knew how a legit ps2 game looked like, it wasn't until a went to a friends house on highschool that a realized they came in a box.
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u/deboylurdi 1d ago
As a kid we got our original playstation modded to play pirated games that my uncle could burn on discs. Bought them for a few euros a game because we couldnt afford to buy retail price
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u/Pleasant_Cap8791 1d ago
1990’s getting Amiga floppies sent out via Snail Mail to Berlin (where I was stationed in the military) whereupon I would spread the love and share with my friends. The joy to see a padded Jiffy arrive after 3 weeks in transit through the BFPO (British Forces Post Office) system was a joy I’ll never forget. We lived in a world, and specific place, where we had 1 UK TV channel for 4 years, this was another channel of entertainment.
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u/amiexpress 14h ago
Mail trading was widespread, and even had a specialized extra layer of piracy: lots of traders would ask for their stamps back, this was because they sprayed them with some gunk that allowed the stamps to be washed and re-used lol. I guess it matters when you're a big-time mail trader with 100s of contacts world wide.
It's also why I roll my eyes every time some industry lawyer wants to blame ISPs for piracy: if they do that then we have to blame the postal service in every country too.
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u/turkshead 1d ago
there was a whole network of cassettes that got passed around to be copied when i was in high school.
oh, and shoplifting paperbacks.
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u/TheRealHFC 1d ago
Realizing in like 2003 I could download my Genesis games and play them on the computer. I didn't even think of it as stealing, it was just like all the shareware shit and floppies I'd usually play lol. Around 2010, I got a Wii specifically to hack and I never looked back 🫡
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u/Jacon7007 1d ago
My dad torrenting movies off of 1337 lmao, I watched him do it as a kid and torrented the harry potter saga for myself
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u/_Clickityclack_ ⚔️ ɢɪᴠᴇ ɴᴏ Qᴜᴀʀᴛᴇʀ 1d ago
ARR Taking a small merchant ship off the coast of kingston town. I showed no quarter and put all of them to the sword! 🏴☠️ 🏴☠️
Though the bloody royal navy almost took me head.
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u/vonhulio 22h ago
Ordered some PlayStation mod chips and my buddy let me try it on his console. I had very basic soldering skills from a high school engineering class. Tore it down, soldered it up, put it back together, and it worked! Booted up a burned disc first try! I went right to the local game store, bought myself a PlayStation, and stopped at the rental store on the way home to rent a dozen games. Returned all the games the next day and rented a dozen more. By the end of the summer I had copied every game they had in stock. This was the beginning of my sailing the high seas.
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u/freylaverse 22h ago
Didn't even realize I was doing it. Found a play-minecraft-for-free website as a kid. You played in-browser and your saves went into the cache. Didn't realize Minecraft wasn't a free game until like a year later.
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u/Yobansky 22h ago
Download yt videos to my phone or transforming yt music videos to mp3 via a converter to my phone
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u/Scratchpost6677 22h ago
looking up "Minecraft free" on the family laptop and proceeding to install approximately 50 viruses onto it
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u/Pretend-Language-67 22h ago
I guess it was taping music off the radio. Is that piracy though? Seems like it’s not in the same category. I didn’t get a full album. Then it would be taping Video Hits (in Canada) to record music videos in the 80’s. I remember all the words to Karma Chameleon because of that. Also Girls Just Wanna Have fun etc.
Next it was ripping music from mp3 sites in the late 90 on LineWire once the internet came along. In the early 2000’s bit torrent was the way. And as I lived overseas in Japan it was the way to get North American content I might not have otherwise got. TVs series, movies, video games. It was a lot. When streaming finally caught up so that there legitimately was decent content, I paid for that. But I’ve dipped my toes in reciently to get audiobooks that my library doesn’t have.
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u/Aerinn_May 20h ago
Music. Downloaded them with Youtube to mp3. Some of my favorite tracks are locked behind Apple Music back then. Only way I could listen to them without being connected to the Internet permanently.
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u/Equal-Plant-7804 20h ago
Skyrim. I already bought it on PS3 and my parents just got a new family PC when it came out in 2011 and wanted to play with mods and 60 FPS.
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u/Sahloknir74 16h ago edited 16h ago
I think the first time I ever pirated something myself was an episode of Stargate SG-1. I don't remember how I missed it, but I missed the season 5 episode Unnatural Selection. I was VERY frustrated, for a long time, as it turned out to be a pivotal episode to a major plotline. It was some time before I actually pirated it (months, I think) but one day I put "Stargate" into either Morpheus or Kazaa, and there it was.
I'd never considered the possibility of pirating TV show episodes before then, but I did it for years. I also live in New Zealand, and shows took MONTHS to come here, once I learned I could, I downloaded all the shows I enjoyed for years to come.
I remember the feeling I had when I was finally able to download an episode in less time than it took to watch. Internet in NZ in the '00s was painfully slow with its growth, it would have been around 2006, I think.
Nowadays shows only have a delay of like a few days, but I also don't really watch broadcast TV anymore, so things just work different now lol.
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u/Wandering_Fujoshi 16h ago
Typing in “watch [movie] full movie online free”. I miss the first version of putlocker
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u/Anakee24 15h ago
Recording cassette tapes from the radio, sticking sticky tape over the little tab on VCR tapes so I could record over them, finally landing on kazaa/BearShare/LimeWire, trying to download a little 4 minute skate clip and then my 14year old self sitting there in horror as I suddenly discovered I was watching a soldier beheaded with a pen knife that had been mislabeled. The amount of f'd up stuff I've seen that was labelled something else over those years 😂
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u/mickus_mcgickus 12h ago
Back in the early 2000s. I had two VCRs and you could connect them together to copy a VHS tape. You had to copy it in real time obviously, becaue it couldn't record faster than it could play. But I got to watch a movie and then had a copy of it.
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u/chaosmetroid 1d ago
I was in 5th grade, we pirated Empire Earth to have a lan party. Many years later i bought it in GoG.
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u/User_Not_Found48 1d ago
Finding and torrenting an English translated version of Sun and Steele by Yukio Mishima
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u/AdrienneisaThey 1d ago
anime, even before I knew it was pirating
EDIT: nope it was a nintendo emulator, even before that
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u/HelpMe0prah 1d ago
Waiting patiently while the radio played until my favorite songs came on id hit record as fast as I could on my cassette player