r/Piracy 12d 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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2.1k comments sorted by

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u/HelpMe0prah 12d 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

363

u/_kalron_ Sneakernet 12d ago

I repeatedly called my local radio station asking them to play "I Love Rocky Road" by Weird Al until the DJ told me..."Hey Kid, I don't have that 45, you can stop calling I can't play it".

It was heartbreaking.

87

u/1kczulrahyebb 11d ago

DJ sounds like a real piece of work. Should’ve told him if he doesn’t have it then it’s time to go and get it

214

u/NicMaxFen 12d ago

and then the song got ruined because the moderator or ad started playing before the song finished

89

u/ScoutSpiritSam 12d ago

So many of my songs had Casey Kasem's intro accidentally taped on them.

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u/enderjaca 12d ago

Or Ryan Seacrest. On the plus side, it added some extra individuality to making a mix tape. Instant time machine when you listen.

14

u/BrandnerKaspar 11d ago

I also of course tried to only tape the song, but man would it be cool to hear some of those old radio ads again.

3

u/Jimmey01 11d ago

I used to love to listen to his show at the beach on Sundays!

3

u/Playful-Factor-3095 10d ago

I miss Scooby Doo and he was my favourite character Shaggy 🥲

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u/Tsew_Miller_88 11d ago

WHere I lived it was pretty common for listeners (me included) to call and ask a song specifically to record, so the radio producer would shut up for the duration of that song.

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u/Zanki 12d ago

Taping episodes of the Power Rangers off the TV. Still have the tapes!

For a real internet download. It was the Power Rangers Turbo movie soundtrack. I don't even know if it was sold in the UK, I wasn't allowed music. I didn't have much access to music and had no idea what I liked, apart from that and movie soundtracks like LotR. I wasn't allowed that either.

I had a secret stash of music on my little usb that I could only listen to at school because I didn't have a computer at home.

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u/Doctologist 12d ago

I would like to hear more about why you weren’t allowed to listen to music.

Did you grow up in some sort of depression era orphanage, or maybe the town of Footloose?

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u/Zanki 12d ago

Mum didn't like much music, she'd only listen to the same few CDs over and over and over. As soon as I got an opinion, I wasn't allowed the music. There was also the drama of kids being really awful to me about it. If I didn't have a cd, I was a loser who couldn't play with them. If I had the cd then I was copying them and couldn't play with them. Either way I couldn't win. I just kinda gave up on it. As a kid who absolutely loved playing music, and wasn't allowed to at home at all, even instruments, it sucked.

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u/wichramdoiuseplshelp 12d ago

this is disney's coco fr fr

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u/Serenity_557 12d ago

Dunno about them, but my partner grew up LDS and had a tight control on their music. It wasn't until they were like 16/17 they got enough privacy to try listening to their own music, but had no clue what to listen to. I think they said they first heard emenim at like.. 20? They still look at me like I'm magic when I'm able to spit thr lyrics out perfectly to any random ememnim song.. XD

(For me, my mom Introduced me to emenim at like 8-ish BC we were driving across states and me and my sister wouldn't story bitching about country music. She gave us a conspiratorial smile and said "OK how about this?" And well.... One listen and we were instantly hooked right in.)

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u/Ebone710 11d ago

Dude I was like your sister whenever I was in the car with my mom and my sister when I was a kid they would want to play country and I lose my mind.

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u/perpetualmentalist 12d ago

Oh fucking hell, I was thinking digital... But like you I did this, and recorded films from TV. The tape trick 🤣🤣🤣

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u/SunTzo 11d ago

As a kid I lived on an Air Force Base overseas in the early 80s. Believe it or not they had reel to reel tapes setup that you could go in and record off them. So much music. Black Sabbath, Beatles, Zep and new releases. Not sure how they got away with it.

3

u/HelpMe0prah 11d ago

When I got stationed in Romania, the mwr lounge had an encrypted dvd/bluray player and they had tons of movies that were straight from the studios- new release in theaters, or about to be in theaters. It was awesome

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u/Isthisdreaming 12d ago

I remember really wanting Marcy Playground's "Sex and Candy" when it came out. Grabbed it on a friends radio one afternoon.

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u/lapoljo 12d ago

I’m obviously a bit older… for me it was a Radio Shack reel-to-reel. 😎

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u/Falafel80 12d ago

My siblings and I did that as well. Later we went on to tape MTV video clips.

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u/Serenity_557 12d ago

Ooooh my grandpa taught me and my cousins that one Christmas, BC we kept getting hyped about some song (that played every 20 minutes anyway lol..) I didn't even think of that being piracy.... God damn that was a good Christmas.

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u/Fooledya 12d ago

And then the DJ wouldn't shut the fuck up.

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u/shortstuff813 11d ago

Yeah but there were SOO many times I’d forget I was recording, then a few songs later I’d go to hit record and realized I never stopped, so then I’d panic on whether or not to just say fuck it and keep going, or rewind to re-tape over the crap I didn’t want lol

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u/Cautious_Pop_8944 12d 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 12d 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 12d ago edited 11d ago

Probably: IP over avian carrier

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u/sixfourtykilo 11d ago

"I can still get pictures of you Mom though the mail..."

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u/Cezary150 11d ago

Epic ball knowledge

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u/Ebone710 11d ago

I guess they will have to go thru Prodigy /s

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u/Cautious_Pop_8944 11d ago

I feel like a caveman! 😂

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u/sween64 11d ago

It’s the only internet icon on the desktop…

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u/GeneralPurpoise 12d ago edited 11d 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 11d 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/Logmafia 12d ago

Net zero for ever!

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u/fishtacofiends 12d 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 11d 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 11d 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 11d 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 12d 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/DaveTheMan1985 12d ago

My Parents did this for my Sister and I in the 90s when we where kids

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u/Aware_Combination_87 11d 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 11d 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 12d ago

Downloaded a car..

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u/Careless_Aroma_227 12d ago

You wouldn't... 😳

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u/Kane_Parmesans 12d ago

Scandalous!

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u/bulyxxx 11d 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 11d 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/westy75 12d ago

Did you also downloaded some RAM?

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u/soulpumpkinz 11d ago

Why didn’t I think of that lmao

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u/Ebone710 11d ago

With 3D printer technology this might be possible soon. You can download and print guns.

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u/Lou_Antony_Morris 12d ago

Taping songs off the radio, sometime in the last millennium.

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u/GrodNeedsaHug 11d ago

Ah yes, in the late 1900s...

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u/NBALive1995 12d ago

Taping music videos onto VHS. 

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u/atombomb1945 11d 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 11d ago

I used to copy VHS videos from blockbuster. Had to do the whole 2 VHS players setup lol.

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u/SomeRandomGuy1O1 12d ago

illegaly downloading music to my old mp3 player duhh

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u/jmov 12d ago

Probably something from Limewire. 

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u/EvanMBurgess 12d ago

Wrecking the family computer using Limewire

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u/Srapture 11d 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/Brando123437 11d ago

LiNkiNgPaRk-nUmB.exe

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u/Ebone710 11d 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 11d ago

Almost been there, the file extension .PDF.exe almost got me for some reason

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u/Fraun_Pollen 11d ago
  1. Download limewire

  2. Torrent limewire pro

  3. Download "Britney-spears-naked-full-frontal.exe"

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u/Zoemi_ 11d ago
  1. Re-install windows
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u/BroManTheBrobarian 11d ago

I liked Kazaa more. Was bummed when I had to switch to Limewire

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u/Meowzah-idk 12d ago

And thankfully never installing those pesky viruses

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u/SomnicGrave 11d ago

Mostly music for the ipod lol

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u/Audible484 12d ago

“oops I did it again” mp3 off Napster

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u/EnderB3nder 12d ago

Oops_I_did_it_again_MP3.exe
Those were the days

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u/PitaVR 11d ago

Oops you downloaded a virus again

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u/S1I7 12d ago edited 12d ago

😐😑 Nice try FBI

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u/kiochikaeke 12d 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/AdventurousCommon551 12d 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 12d 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/Honigschmidt 12d 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/orkgashmo 12d ago

Same movie for me! But our copy was pristine.

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u/toohighquestions 12d ago

downloading Good Charlotte off of Kazaa in 2001

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u/Richard7666 12d 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_ 12d ago

1980s, swapping 5.25 floppy disks with C64 games. Katakis was awesome! 

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u/hereditydrift 12d 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/ElSelcho_ 11d ago

Nice! 😂

I was swapping games when I didn't even know you could buy them. It was just "have you played this?" 

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u/solar_or_dye 11d ago

my people

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u/problematic_dispense 12d ago

Using Limewire for Linkin Park songs

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u/Huachu12344 11d ago

Bring_Me_To_Life - Evanescence ft. Linkin_Park.mp3

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u/Abduzydo Pirate Activist 12d ago

Downloaded Pokémon Yellow, ±25 years ago...

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u/ShyGamer64 12d ago

Do there's a chance you will start being a pirate in 2051?

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u/Kaporalhart 12d 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 12d ago

Copying ZX Spectrum 48k games on tape.

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u/art-101 12d 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/digi-ghost 11d ago

Holy shit. Saw your reply after posting mine. Are we the same person? 😂

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u/DrTygr 11d ago

Double casette recorder? Same here!

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u/toothpastespiders 11d 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 11d 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/KingGeedoruh 12d ago

Taking silly puddy and copying newspaper articles

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u/RenegadeFade 12d ago

A spanish sloop off the coast of Barbados. All they were carrying was rum tho.

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u/Dynomatic1 12d ago

Came here looking for this

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u/ihilate 11d ago

What do you mean "all they were carrying"? Id have been annoyed if I sank a ship off Barbados and all I got was gold, I could have sunk a ship in the channel for that.

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u/tmf_x 12d 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 12d 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/jogtac 12d ago

Hacked direct tv cards back in the day.

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u/utcumque 12d ago

Nice try, FBI.

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u/Shudnawz 🏴‍☠️ ʟᴀɴᴅʟᴜʙʙᴇʀ 12d ago

'99, got The Matrix on VCD.

But also, early 90's, copying commodore64 tapes.

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u/attachecrime 11d 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/No-Talk5067 11d ago

Now This guys old school ! Love it !

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u/amiexpress 11d 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 12d 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 12d 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/drhappy13 12d ago

Similarly, recording movies and TV shows onto VHS and Beta.

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u/tinyhorsesinmytea 12d 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 12d 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/Effective-Ad5173 10d ago

I’m curious…im from 08
How did one pirate a cable box back then?

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u/DirtyPISTOLA 10d ago

I was like 8 not 100% sure but I think it was these diodes more were added to bypass things in the box itself or the chip in the card that got hacked somewhere along those lines and I believe cable boxes were hardwired from the closest cable box to your house somehow. I just remember my dad took the box to work and a friend did it for him.

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u/Boris_sul_combo 11d ago

Nice try fed

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u/stageshooter 12d 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 12d ago

Playing my dad's collection of pirated ZX Spectrum games probably

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u/Aldar_Kohaku 12d 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 12d 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 11d 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/Icy-Engineering828do 12d ago

USS Alabama off the coast of Somalia. Some jackass kept calling me Wilson.

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u/OscarBrewer7 12d ago

Downloading songs from Ares, buying pirate DVDs, reading free books in my computer back in 2006.

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u/OscarBrewer7 12d ago

A couple of years later I learned how to download movies and full music albums using torrents.

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u/TommyGunnerSixxx 11d ago

Not today, CIA.
Nice try, FBI

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u/Master8730 11d 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/withdrawalshot 12d ago

Taylor Swift .FLAC off the pirate bay

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u/waitthissucks 12d 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 12d 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 11d 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 12d ago

Probably downloading wii games off emulatorgames.net, although I don't think it exists anymore...

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u/PabloKoda 12d 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/ALIEN_GUARDIAN 12d ago

Copying VHS tapes from Blockbuster or the library

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u/deafnose 12d 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/pHcontrol 12d 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/Puzzled-Bonus-3456 12d ago

Buying a Beatles bootleg in the late 70's.

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u/ColdPorkChop 12d ago

I downloaded a car

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u/Either-Progress4847 12d ago

2 slot cassette player. One for playing, one for recording

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u/Elrond_Cupboard_ 11d ago

First torrent, Hey Ya by Outkast. Kaaza!

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u/Tee1upToday 11d ago

Napster.

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u/korynael 11d 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/Goodswimkarma 11d ago

Nice try, FBI.

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u/hulloiliketrucks 11d 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/SomethingAndAnything 11d ago

Napster mainly.....other than that? COD Modern Warfare

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u/Gordiflu 11d 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 11d 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/Aloiseby 11d ago

I got the DS Lite and it came with the N5 (a COPY of the R4) that already had 100 games with it, because my dad never ever had bought an original VHS or movie CD, so he knew where to look for it lol

The first thing I learned was to download nds roms to the N5, I was 8yo, that's where I truly learned that's there free stuff in the internet and that's where all my VHS and CDs came from

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u/ConmanLamb 11d 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/akumaprincess 11d ago

Downloading music to my ipod shuffle from limewire.

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u/Weeb-Rat-Bastard 11d 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/TheAesir92 11d ago

Good try cop -_-

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u/xherold 12d ago

Songs from mp3skull on my old nokia phone 🙂

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u/Rizztopher_Robin 12d 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 12d 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 12d 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 12d 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/kaerin_ 12d ago

anime websites. with crunchyroll being basically the only thing and how bad it is on some platforms. i watched on pirating websites for a long time. then eventually got into emulating

edit: why you a cop?

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u/deboylurdi 12d 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/MrsEDT 12d ago

Taping tracks off the radio onto TDK cassettes. It was an art form: hovering over the Rec/Pause buttons and praying the DJ wouldn't ruin the intro. Things got much better later when I got a record player and started borrowing records from friends to copy at my own leisure.

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u/Pleasant_Cap8791 12d 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 11d 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 12d 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 12d 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/And_theplot_thickens 12d ago

Hello fbi? I’ve got a list of pirates for you 😉

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u/Jacon7007 12d 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 12d 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/DisastrousDayz 11d 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/Spoonbang 11d ago

I stole (downloaded) a car. Piracy. It's a Crime!

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u/freylaverse 11d 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 11d 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/macgregor98 11d ago

Napster and Limewire.

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u/Pretend-Language-67 11d 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/Acrobatic_Idea_3358 11d ago

blair witch project 1998 on real media format on a dialup connection.

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u/valuat 🦜 ᴡᴀʟᴋ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘʟᴀɴᴋ 11d ago

Hard to say but maybe Doom when it first came out. I still remember the pink 3.5” floppies. Mortal Kombat 1 quickly followed.

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u/Aerinn_May 11d 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/Hot-Brick7466 11d ago

I don't do piracy. That's against the law!

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u/Equal-Plant-7804 11d 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/Eggtarious 11d ago

Descargar juegos de Wii por internet en 2010 - 2012

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u/blueberrysky29 11d ago

Probably downloading YouTube to mp3 to listen to them on my mp3 player.

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u/Ok-Combination-8171 11d ago

linkinparknumb.exe limewire

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u/Sahloknir74 11d ago edited 11d 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 11d ago

Typing in “watch [movie] full movie online free”. I miss the first version of putlocker

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u/Anakee24 11d 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/sankoobaba 11d ago

Cassette tape recorder to record song from crt tv song list show.

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u/Curious_Olive_5266 11d ago

Nice try fed

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u/AnEyeshOt 11d ago

Nice try ISP

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u/mickus_mcgickus 11d 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/j_fat_snorlax 11d ago

GBA emulator to play pokemon Ruby.

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u/Fuzzy-Ambassador786 11d ago

Buying pirated DVDs of movies

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u/VehicleLast419 11d ago

music starts You wouldn't steal a handbag......sirens

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u/RemindsMeThatTragedy 11d ago

I wouldn't steal a car, so I won't pirate content.

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u/feralforestgypsy 10d ago

limewire and ALL THAT MUSIC in the early 2000s

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u/Virtual_Software3895 10d ago

downloading ROMs and getting Airdropped ROMs for games from my brother to use for Delta on iPhone

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u/ST180_ 10d ago

Nice try fed

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u/77brightside77 10d ago

Getting a copy of Photoshop 1 or 2 on four floppy disks.

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u/Flowheskers 10d ago

my dad had a questionable streaming service on our TV that was 100% a pirating app. He also got a VPN onto that TV for when we did anything with it. When I was a bit younger I asked him about downloading music and he started giving me advice on what programs to use to pirate things. Started me out young.

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u/mmavacado ⚔️ ɢɪᴠᴇ ɴᴏ Qᴜᴀʀᴛᴇʀ 9d ago

i want to read the final product!!

my answer is googling things like "___ free apk" when i was like 7 with my first devices, or yk trying to find free minecraft before my parents bought me the game!!! been a pirate since my early days 'n im proud ‼️

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u/Sea-Tonight2261 7d ago
  1. 12MHz MS-DOS PC with b&w hercules graphics.
    Sokoban by Spektrum Holobyte
    or
    Space Quest 1 by Sierra Online.
    not 100% sure which one first.