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People who pirated in the late 90s and early 00s what is the most dramatic change from then till now? And if you had the power what would you bring back?
Ease of grabbing content. There are so many tools that make it too easy and automated. I mean this has changed drastically in the last 10 years let alone 90s.
The whole political discussion about Internet media licensing, like a 10-15€ tax to finance artists while making piracy global. In the end we have the same except it’s financing Internet millionaires over artists
Is it weird that I don't want to pay for any streaming media, I don't have a cable package, but if some reasonable system were created such as that I could have access to digital copies of media for a flat monthly rate I would pay it?
Like if someone would come and just say you pay $80 a month and you can watch listen to or read anything you can find and save them all locally for future reuse, no problems, I would probably pony up.
Yes I’m also the same way with ads. I’d happily spend more for internet if there was somehow an “ad surcharge” that would mean I’d never see ads or be tracked. Let me pay whatever the advertisers pay.
I’d rather pay the same then use knowledge online to learn how to circumvent their bullshit. I will never pay companies to remove bullshit ‘features and items’ that make services inherently worse. It only enables them to continue molesting and raping you
I really miss the original Napster. I got so many good songs off of there. Now I really don’t know where to find new music that I’m going to like. I feel like I’ve listed to most of the stuff out there (even though I know that’s impossible), or it’s just not a unique sound. Everything just seems to blend together even on a “discovery” mix seeded with artists I don’t listen to much.
Usenet Newsgroups were a big part of my life back then. Games, MP3s, Software, Movies, TV shows. So many Xbox games that I burned to DVD and loaded onto my modded Xbox. Those were the days. Now I only torrent some movies and TV shows thru a VPN and pay for everything else. My time is worth a lot more to me now than back in the late 90s/early 2000s.
One of the local secondary schools had a mailserver. No one knew or took security seriously in the mid-to-late nineties. As a result, it also hosted an ftp-server with widely shared credentials that held some 20GB worth of mp3s when it was shut down after three years in service. It was one of the biggest in the country at the time.
Irc and DCC-transfers were huge, too. As CD-writers became common place, a lot of it took place over snail mail or sneakernet. A guy at school had printed lists of all his tunes and took orders to burn them to music CDs.
I think the limited selection and limited transfers/storage made you cherish things more. Today you’ll never finish your library in your lifetime.
I used to pirate games because there was no legal digital distribution. The pirate version I could get faster and wouldn’t hassle me to put the right disk in the drive before I could play.
Then digital distribution got good, DRM got less obnoxious, and malware got meaner.
I used to pirate music for similar reasons.
I didn’t pirate video because the files were too large, and around the time bandwidth caught up, Netflix got good. Now digital video distribution is awful so I pirate video until they solve the fractured storefront problem.
How much easier it’s gotten and most of what you download nowadays is exactly what you’re looking for. In the 90’s/00’s, alot of what was pirated had the potential to just be total BS or mislabeled, so you were never entirely certain what it was you were getting. I think Madonna had even gotten into it and released a one of her own albums as a fake download with her telling the listener “What the fuck are you doing?” At the time I mostly got music, though the Dreamcast pirating scene was pretty big for me for awhile. I think anymore though I’m probably more interested in obscure RPG books now.
I think with torrenting, there’s a certain amount of trust that’s inherent with some torrents by virtue of the number of downloads/seeders there are on a torrent. At least for me, I can assume, ok, there’s 100 people seeding this thing, chances are this is exactly what it says it is, otherwise this many people wouldn’t be still seeding it (you can fool some people some of the time, or something like that). I don’t pirate nearly as often as I did when I was younger, but now I feel the need to use protection (via a VPN) because you just don’t know who might be watching. In my entire time having pirated stuff over multiple decades, I had only ever gotten a single letter from my ISP, so it’s not something that I ever felt particularly afraid of, but you never know and it’s better to be safe about that stuff.
We torrented so many movies, so so many movies. It quit being a question of what we wanted to watch and just became a game of how much can I get today. Then I just wandered away from it one day. I never received any letters. I do have a friend who got a letter from Lucas.
It’s largely the same because we started out with mostly enthusiasts doing it in semi hidden places. Then it was mainstreamed and became too easy for casuals to do out in the open. So laws and enforcement caught up and now it’s most effective again if you know your way around, which most casuals won’t if they can afford a few streaming services.
One big change is no longer having to burn any media, you download something then it’s on plex and you can watch it instantly.
If I could bring anything back from the 90s it would be a big selection of games, movies, tv, music, and books that I actually care enough to consume. There’s hardly anything worth downloading anymore.
If I had the power today I’d bring back services that were shamed into actually providing a reasonably priced service that offers good value.
I don’t like pirating, I’d rather pay a fair price for services since I want those services to continue but I’m not fucking paying 15/month to watch a single show I’d enjoy.