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Anon gives a piracy history lesson (lemmy.nz)

submitted 1 month ago by GolfFoxtrotLima@sh.itjust.works to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/30015573

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[-] LNRDrone@sopuli.xyz 23 points 1 month ago

Yeah piracy was everywhere during the cassette tape and floppy disk era, I don't think it just was called piracy yet back then

[-] rebelrbl@sh.itjust.works 29 points 1 month ago

Bootlegging is what we called it as kids

[-] wyldrstallyns@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 month ago

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...)

[-] rebelrbl@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 month ago

5-10 years ago I would have said agitprop but man, I’m getting old and more and more I feel the weight of things like Limewire and 9/11 being nouns the youngins genuinely don’t know. So I’m actually not sure lol

[-] k0e3@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago

Same. Or a burnt copy for physical discs.

My Cantonese-speaking wife taught me the term fan-ban when we were dating and I've been calling it that ever since.

[-] Souvenir@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[-] bedwyr@piefed.ca 2 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] wyldrstallyns@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[-] wyldrstallyns@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

Surprised that didn't 1337 the name. 🤣

this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2026

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