The reason of pirating things because you would be offline has mostly disappeared. Partially because mobile data has become more affordable but also because more subscription based apps give you some way to consume content offline.
Where I see this the most is with music. Outside of those who want FLAC quality I don’t know of a lot of people who pirate music anymore.
Honestly? I have no idea how to pirate now. That’s the biggest change.
Mp3 to cdda sounds like shit
The thing to remember is that internet and cellular service wasn’t available everywhere. I had to talk 10 minutes to a hill to get service to be able to make a cellular phone call. Most internet options required landline phones and wifi was barely off the ground for most consumers.
Media was something we extracted from the internet. Now the internet is something we have to extract ourselves from.
One thing I truly miss from the Winamp days of piracy was the live feeds. Anime, porn, music, some great adventures discovered from just browsing. It’s how I discovered Deftones, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Sindee Coxx.
I miss my hard drive full of music. Sure some of it was mislabeled, but at least I didn’t have to deal with ads.
Many people work from home and don’t have very many Internet providers in their area. In a post COVID world, many people are never getting a job in an office. They can’t risk losing their job over losing Internet access over piracy.
People still gloat about piracy being a hydra where you cut off one head and more pop up. Except it isn’t any where close to that. Probably hasn’t been in at least 10-15 years. Piracy has been gradually chipped away at. People don’t seem to want to admit that. As if that would be siding with anti-piracy or something.
In its heyday the catalogues of content was immense in breadth and depth. Just about any obscure thing could be found. These days even popular TV shows become more difficult to come by even a short while after the episode has been released. Unless you have access to more private parts of the web then you’re left trying to source some low quality trash tier download.
Which brings me to the next point. Piracy used to be about providing the best possible quality. With popularity the quality got watered down. Opportunists came in trying to monetize it which drew the attention of authorities. Which drew the attention more opportunists which drew the attention of authorities. It snowballed.
What piracy used to be was the spirit of the original internet. It was the library not just a library but the library of humanity. People catalogued and shared because that’s what librarians do.
If I had the power I’d take away its popularity. Make it obscure again. It was better when it was ruled by snobs and autistic perfectionists.
Piracy used to be about providing the best possible quality. With popularity the quality got watered down.
Do you think that has to do with popularity though or a shifting attitude towards piracy?
I feel like there’s a lot of people who treat it like they would with streaming. Downloading the newest episode or season of a show and deleting it almost immediately. They don’t feel the need to store it for later.
People do keep stuff might be limited by their storage. A 1TB portable HDD can be great but if you are downloading entire shows it can devour it pretty quickly.
Either way I feel like a lot of people aren’t concerned about quality. They care about having immediate access to it.
This. TPB was almost a trust worthy site in 2010’s. They had ads for penis enlargement and domains changed constantly, but it was so easy to find everything there. Now it’s hard to find a mirror that will let you click a magnet link and most of the time the torrents are dead.
Sounds like you should get involved with PTs, they’d be right up your alley. The spirit is alive and well.
I remember that my brother acquired the full collection of every single song which had ever been on the top 20 list of songs for a national newspaper. It dated all the way back to the 60’s, which is ancient for my brother and I, both born around the early 90s. I never got close to listening to the full thing, but it was awesome to have a collection of songs which basically no one knew existed and be able to choose a random year and pick a popular song from then to listen to.
You could do pretty much the same thing now, but the fact that it’s so easily available and accesible kills a lot of the magic.
Early eights it was disk and tape trading, mostly tape trading in the UK. Was a way more social activity.
Late 80s and early 90s, it was all disk, and you really needed a connected friend who could get the menu disks (custom pirated compilation disks). These were often super hoarded, only traded for a lot of games, like certain private trackers today.
Very early web stuff was all usenet and ftp servers, often hosted at a university. If you knew where to look, anything was accessible.
Early 2000s was a golden period of easy access. It would be slow, and the quality would often be low if it was a video or mp3. It’s gotten harder to find the obscure stuff as time has gone on. I
t’s like the scene only remembers out and out classics or the latest thing outside of some niche places.
Usenet was awesome. A distributed, decentralized network, with thousands of forums. Until it got taken over by spam and porn and a lack of moderation.
Now we have Lemmy. Let’s not mess it up.
Late 80s early 90s there were literal adverts in the classified section of the paper by pirates where you could buy 100s of games for a set sum (very cheap usually). Often you mailed empty disks to them and the money, and they would return it with games. They would also have monthly printed newsletters about new titles.
Always been a bloke in the pub or car boot or whatever that can supply hooky dvds or games or hacked satellite, FAST always talks tough about busting them.
Maybe 2010s but there was this program called Sopcast. It would stream live sports in HD through P2P and it worked amazingly! Don’t know what happened to that but now it’s just shitty sites filled with ads.
I’ve never had any issues finding a footy stream. Iptv is pretty good, for example.
Id actually bring back the power to pirate.
The amount of effort that has gone into trying to extract every possible stream dollar makes me just wanna fuck the system. I am happy to pay to watch or play something, but pirating is the only way to get it without being ripped, “this is no longer available” or “buy this other platform and make an account”.
Steam and GoG got alot of my money because I could buy what I actually wanted. I would have happily paid for a soap2day app that allowed me to just select and watch stuff. The amount of 90s cartoons I could show the kids…
I miss mixed CDs. You meet someone, you understand their music tastes, and you make them a mix of stuff that you think they’d like, but from your favorite known artists. I made plenty, and ones I received got me into some awesome bands.
There was this Russian website where you could download whole albums for like 50 cents. I absolutely loved it, because as well as current hits it also had the most obscure, crazy stuff, classical music, jazz, and world music. I think they’re all in prison now, the guys who ran it.
There were a handful of them. Two I remember are allofmp3 and something like mp3eagle. One of those introduced me to Muse around the time Black holes and Revelations came out.
Memory unlocked.
I definitely know what you’re talking about (dispite not remembering the name of it) but they had everything. And if they didn’t, you could request it and they’d find it.
I miss that site now
Allofmp3?
Yes!
Holy cow haha. I “bought” so much music there. They got a ton of obscure gypsy brass band stuff for me when I asked too (Fanfare Ciocarlia)
Yeah that’s the one. I got so much music from that site.
You can get an entire album or discography now. Back then I remember getting random loose mp3s of artists I was interested in, dictated by how many seeds happened to be online. Not sure I would bring that back, but it did make for some deep cuts becoming my favourite songs and not just the well known “hits” from albums.
The most dramatic change is probably how easy it is to hear any of that music in a legit way, and hear it instantly.
This is how I stumbled onto Soulseek—I needed albums, not tracks
I burned CDs just titled “Pink Floyd”, “Beatles” or “Radiohead” with their entire discography of mp3s on it. I really got deep into a lot of bands back then.
