Also, production companies started pulling their shit from netflix long before Netflix Originals became a thing. Wrong on all accounts
“Piracy” (in a sense of unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials) was a thing ever since copyright became a thing. Otherwise you wouldn’t need copyright to be a law.
Movie/video piracy existed since the 80s, before TPB there were bootleg DVDs, before then there was bootleg VHS. For music it goes back even further, reel-to-reel machines which could copy entire albums at good-enough quality existed back in the 1950s, and compact cassettes got good-enough for music in the 70s.
I remember watching so many movies that I had either taped off television or scraped from one VHS to another. I had a double feature of Krull and Logan’s Run. I watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit? anytime I wanted. The Empire Strikes Back had been briefly taped over with a few minutes of a Who’s the Boss episode, such that I never saw the scene where Luke hides in an animal carcass until those movies were rereleased in the… late 90s I think? I had cassette mix tapes with songs taken from radio or my dad’s record collection.
bad history.
even in 2007, piracy was a niche thing. your lame cousin probably didn’t download from demonoid or the pirate bay. more people did then than now but it wasn’t substantial.
there was still a reason to pirate even with netflix–there was a ton of content not available on DVD at that time.
at least 10 years ago all the good private torrent sites became severely restricted, some even entirely closing the doors for new members.
not sure where this piracy resurgence is going on, but it’s not on the good sites.
I don’t think its fair to say piracy was niche in the early 2000s either though, everyone had napster or limewire/frostwire.
And netflix wasn’t originally streaming only, they started out as online DVD rentals which exploded and then added streaming as a second offering (only discontinuing DVD rentals in 2023).
The modern piracy resurgence is certainly not torrents, though for the power users it is (or usenet), its online streaming sites like whatever the equivalent of 123movies is these days
Jesus Christ, these kids really think nothing existed before widespread high speed internet adoption eh?
Yeah I was buying ripped, printed and mass produced pirated games from the early 90s.
And selling VHS with movies. Piracy is as old as time.
Daisy chained vcr watch parties.
2007? Sit down junior.
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The real winners here are pirates because thanks to companies streaming quality media, we get quality pirated media the moment or hours later, whereas with film we had to wait until DVD until we got quality pirated film.
I definitely don’t miss cam rips. No movie was worth that wonky, noisy, messy version with bozo breathing into the cam mic and people standing up in front of you.
In my case, i went back to physical media. Bought a blhray player and now my boyfriend and I are gradually expanding our movie library when we feel like it. Some movies and shows don’t exist on dvd/bluray, but that’s okay. I think there is something healthy about not having access to absolutely everything you want at all times. Besides, for me, there is also something satisfying in having ti get up from the couch and change discs and so on. I missed the physical aspect of watching movies and remember how much streaming services fried my fucking brain while i still used them.
It was to the point where you barely register wtf you are watching because everything on streaming services is about the next thing.
Movies werent movies on streaming services, but content and I heard people starting to refer to movies and shows as content at some point and was like “this is fucked”.
Content. Content to fill the void. Not to experience or educate, enlighten or provoke your senses and morality. Just content to distract you.
Ew.
I dont mimd piracy, but i prefer physical media. I no longer wish to follow technollgical advancements. I want to go back and stay at a place where there was some level of conscious and physical effort to watch a movie. That way you remember it better, you slow down and you appreciate the piece of art in front of you rather than seeing it as content.
Get a pioneer Bluray drive for the stuff you cant get on disc, you can always burn it : )
I’ll consider it! I want Pluto (2023) on dvd or bluray, but it is on lock on netflix and i simply refuse to subscribe to that shit. I have a soft spot for Naoki Uwasaki. He’s one of the only mangaka living today, who manages to tell stories that I like.
But yeah, i dont know how piracy deals with language and subtitle options in today’s landscape. Because I prefer to have options and I’m not sure I could get a pirated dvd version where i can switch language and/or subtitles while watching.
But thank you for the the tip, friend! I have starred your comment so i can find it if/when i look into it. 🤗❤️
It would be easiest to get a complete ISO file and just burn that to a DVD of course, but barely anyone is dealing in ISOs these days, if they even exist at all. You can take regular MKV or MP4 files and structure them into a DVD format with DVD Styler.
For a lot of anime at least, look for releases tagged Dual-Audio or Multi-Audio and find the one with the dubs you want. Subtitle tracks are a crapshoot, because they’re so small and easy to edit, so you have to look at descriptions to figure out which ones are included and from which sources (official, fansub). This is less of an issue for non-anime, you’ll usually get every sub track from the original source.
You might have to use Handbrake or ffmpeg to get your MKV source files in a format that DVD Styler accepts. (I saw it doesn’t list MKV support, but it is just a container format for all the things it does list.)
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. 😅)
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 🙂
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.)
Before 2007, but mostly yes.
He skipped over LUSERnet and LimeWire, which was before 2007. Usenet was a big sharing community too before 2007.
Piracy has always been around. It’s the underhand method of getting what someone wants. Empires didn’t mint coins because it was fun, but they needed to identify forgeries. Also, scales were used (and people would use lead) to trick it instead of coin.
I don’t mean to draw attention to it but Usenet never went away, it’s still the best place to find a lot of interesting articles in my opinion.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
Well yes, I was born December 27, 1998
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 . 💁🏼♂️
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