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.
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. 😅)
Yep. Grabbing photoshop 7 via zmodem from a wwiv bbs.
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.
Never paid for any of these streaming shit
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.
The order is a bit off. Production companies starting pulling their content from Netflix after they saw how profitable streaming services could be.
This forced Netflix to start producing their own content.
forced
That’s humanizing the corp way too generously. Nothing “forced Netflix to start producing [its] own content” but itself. 🤑
“Caused” is probably a more appropriate and less loaded term.
same story with spotify, except that spotify itself started as a piracy service…
In that case I wonder if someone could just lift spotify’s entire database and drop it on the internet.
And Anna’s is only the most publicly-known resource for similar. Scraping Spotify, et al, has been viable since the jump. ☝🏼
Same with Crunchyroll.
While VALVe somehow made piracy obsolete for video games then after that they decide to make gaming on linux easier jumpstart the pc handheld market AND making one of the best first party controllers
I forgot about the controller! I want one.
I’ve got three that don’t see any use, with a case & rechargeable batteries for each. Feel free to DM and I’ll send you one, not a worry. 🖖🏼
never paid for netflix or other services, some people never had the money for it and continued buying some films (DVDs were still sold until 2019 pretty widely here) or renting a film every X time and pirating others until the first became impossible and piracy was the only thing.
then the streaming services go to shit with subscription fees, not getting all the content and such, and you see people who showed off being able to pay for those services before or still keep one struggling to get content and slightly becoming pirates again.
this is the other side of the situation. you warned them, they trusted the corpos, and corpos gave them shit.
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.
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!
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
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).
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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It’s not fully accurate to lay the blame at the feet of Netflix. At the time, they just saw the writing on the wall and did what they had to do to survive. Their catalog was massive because, early on, no one thought streaming would work. They had a massive collection of shows and movies that didn’t pull enough of an audience to air on TV for ad revenue. Netflix was able to get a TON of long-term deals that they used to grow, but when those contracts were coming due, the rights holders pulled out and started trying to make their own services. At that point, Netflix basically had to become a studio and pivot to original content, or else they wouldn’t have content at all.
The long and the short of it is that because Netflix was first, it got to set the stage for the golden age of streaming, but because it worked, it was inevitable that streaming would become cable.
It’s not Netflix’s fault. It’s just the course of the entertainment business. They suck now, but back then, I couldn’t think of a single bad thing to say about them… well, maybe that they got rid of the 5-star rating system. That system was definitely used to get metrics for their early programming.
early on, no one thought streaming world work
Yeah, I recall the FUD there being so gawdamn insipid back then. Just gossipy regurge from malinformed archair experts. Thus began my realization that “adults” only got that way by outliving those even stupider —but, every day’s a new chance, eh?
It’s just the course of the entertainment business.
And it works like that for every medium. Guy invents printing bibles and before you know it there are pamphlet and advertisement. Radio wanted to educate and bring peace and soon enough you got propaganda and advertisement.
Radio was the latter long before the efforts toward the former began…
I remember paying $30 USD for a DVD with 3-4 episodes at most of an anime series. 26 episode Cowboy Bebop season? ~$120 USD.
Sure I downloaded that episode of Excel Saga once (❤️). It was 320x240 and took more than a day on my 56k dialup.
At some point I remember going on ebay and buying the entirety of Witch Hunter Robin (which at the time, I chose over Naruto that had just started airing as well, this would turn out to be an important tone setting point in my life …) and getting it for ~$20 USD. Basically just the cost of someone else to download it and burn it to CD for me. Did the same thing with Wolf’s Rain.
Good memories. Of the anime. This shit always sucked.
Wolf’s Rain
Now there a name I’ve not heard in a long time… 🥹
STRAYYYyyyyAYyyAYYY! No regrets cause I got nothing to loooose! Eeeeeverrrrrr stray! 🎶
For me, there was never any move to netflix or any streaming. Piracy has always been cheap and convenient, and I don’t want to deal with big corps
Also, piracy not popular before 2007? Pirate dvd/cd/vhs/etc stands were a very popular thing, at least around here. There was already a lot of piracy before the internet became popular
Yep. OP’s entire statement smells of “I wasn’t paying attention < '07”, and that’s only one point in the series.
Yeah piracy was everywhere during the cassette tape and floppy disk era, I don’t think it just was called piracy yet back then
Bootlegging is what we called it as kids
And, BBS, IRC, etc. were around long before the 90s, too. OP’s a child and/or this is low-effort agitprop. (ah, my fellow plebs in these comments that knew those times well…)
It was also called piracy back then too. It was incredibly common on the Commodore 64 starting in the 80s . They’d often call themselves crackers, because you needed to crack the piracy protection to be able to copy disks.
Those disks and even cassettes would then be shared from person to person or sold in shops or on second hand markets. AFAIK this is also when 1337/leet became popularised, to avoid censorship on BBSes, where file sharing was also possible.
For example, a magazine from 1991:
Note the group is called Elite productions and they call themselves pirates. There’s also mention of crackers, specific events, and I especially enjoy that a piracy/cracking group felt it necessary to add a copyright logo next to the name of their piracy group which was called Elite Productions.
Surprised that didn’t 1337 the name. 🤣
Notably, sometime in the 90’s or early 00s they made a law that made if a federal crime to break any sort of encryption on an electronic or data storage or whatever, at the behest of CD manufacturers.
at the behest of CD manufacturers.
Seems more likely to be content corps, not hardware manufacturers, that would benefit most from that bullshit “law”.
The difference comes out in the wash, though. They might as well have colored themselves red or blue (ahem), to help the cattle know what corpo team they prefer
—despite both colors having been painted onto the same greedy, amoral, and unchecked corpse golem.
I never used netflix either. Their DRM won’t let me watch in 1080p because I’m not using a spyware infested browser and OS. Back when they had a good selection, my internet was too slow to stream HD video anyways.
Fun fact: Linux has that “certification” to watch DRM content while Windows does not, which means you can use whatever browser you want on Linux but not on Windows to watch DRM content
There was plenty of it going on around here. Even after Napster was taken down, there was Kazaa, Limewire, and your choice of Gnutella client. It was mostly us downloading stuff to listen to on the bus because high speed internet was rare unless you were in a city.
The order here is a little wrong, but it’s mostly correct.
Production houses started to see Netflix raking in cash hand over fist and decided that they could do that too and started pulling their shows.
This made Netflix need to pivot hard into in-house content in order to not look like a barren wasteland.
I watched so much scifi on Netflix back in the day. It was really an end of an era moment when they lost Star Trek and Stargate.
Yeah I was about 5 seasons into stargate when it left. Later added it to Jellyfin, ezpz. You can go pretty far with a library card, or a vpn, or Usenet, or…
Hell, one can go pretty far these days with even less effort, IMHO. Maybe it just seems that way after my decades of practice?
I’ve always helped friends, family, kind strangers, etc. to get started on their own liberation journey, and it’s never been more than a few easily-parsed steps: from personal security, to finding the media of choice, to storing it properly, and of course sharing the data & process however they could —as a civic duty. 🤘🏼
Anyone who had a dual cassette deck back in the 80’s didn’t have much issue copying music or game cassettes. Floppy disks were easy to copy too.
Let’s not forget those fuckin’ DJs that talked during a song and forced one to wait again for that track to be played —hoping they wouldn’t stroke their persona to the silent, imagined fan base… but they always did. 🤌🏼
I was downloading cracked video games from BBSes in the early '80s.
Remember when games’ code was printed in the back pages of compsci periodicals? Yeah, that shit was crazy, and any/all bugs were often your own damn fault. 😅 What a teachable moment, every time.
I remember spending what felt like months typing in a game from Compute! magazine and never getting it to work.
Edit: It was Dragonmaster from this issue. It looked so cool to me, but as I mentioned I never got it running.
C64?
Atari 800.
Almost 50 years ago…
When’s your next prostate check?
That’s between me and your dad’s penis
Sorry to tell you this, but my father is not a medical doctor.
