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Are you asking us or the first one ever? Must be some shared academic work over arpa if you mean in general
First "pirated" game i ever got was Elite for the Acorn Archimedes in 1991. Came with a photocopied manual which was essential as the anti-piracy measure was having to type in a word from the manual (think 4th word of the 3rd line of page 12 sort of thing).
That was given to me on a floppy disk.
I'm pretty sure we pulled Dune2 off Usenet.
Iirc doom was pretty widely pirated at the time, I might double check.
Edit: Romero estimates roughly 70-90% of copies were pirated, which would be actually insane given the popularity of the time
Software piracy existed long before the internet and it simply moved from offline copying to bulletin boards to internet-based FTP sites, Usenet and IRC and such once that became common and now I guess mostly P2P.
Bill Gates famously ranted over hobbyists that copied Altair Basic interpreter that he had part in developing back in 1976. Not the first occurance of piracy either, but maybe the first time anyone actually described it as stealing.
The use of the word "piracy" describing unlicensed copying dates hundreds of years back, to book plagiarism and copying. Much later also applied to music bootlegs.
Something to note is in the earlier years of computing software being copy written was not really a thing. The big thing was software for getting a specific piece of hardware to work. Most people were just concerned with getting things working, so when people came along with software they wanted you to pay for it was not really normal. Making the software something you paid for was a change, and so making it difficult to copy or distribute the software was not incentivised.
I expect the first breach of license was probably not because of intentional piracy, rather it was probably just a mistake or misunderstanding.
It was almost certainly software like a game
Before even local networking was really a thing, people were pirating games by just sharing the disks
Don't copy that floppy!
Oh yeah. Shared a lot of Sierra games 30+ years ago!
Before the net was widespread, I was 'pirating" for my Amiga 1000. This is why local Computer User Groups existed :). That and your local BBS.
Although Napster and music downloading really put it into the public eye, the first thing pirated, was definitely a game. We used to have to look up code words in the instruction manual to prove that we bought the game LOOONG before most people knew the high seas even existed.
I remember photocopying game manuals at school to get around this. Lol
LucasArts and I think Sierra games would put red/blue text blocks where you had to put the red film over the text to read it. Photocopying yielded a black box.
My dad had some games that game with a "Lenslok". You had to hold it up to the screen to decode the password.
Why again did I need a double tape deck?
So you could play tapes back-to-back of course. Any decent system could pause the second deck until the tape in the first got to the end, auto-stopped and auto-unpaused the other side. That was an almighty kaCHUNK noise when it happened though so you wouldn't want to be a light sleeper trying to sleep to music with it.
There were also logistical problems with how you chose to play tapes, especially if part 2 of an album was on the other side of a tape.
Or you spent an absolute fortune on a deck that could play the other side without needing to take the tape out. They didn't make many of those.
But yeah, I get your point, one side of those double decks could also record from the radio or the other tape. Which is why in some countries taxes were levied on blank tape media to "reimburse" the poor, struggling music industry for the rampant piracy, where curiously, literally none of that went to the artists. Hmmmm.
It's rather amazing the lengths they went to to make cassettes a thing.
They had some units where they physically spit the tape out, flipped it around, and re-inserted it because they couldn't tune the mechanism to perform well playing in both directions.
Others just flipped the head asseembly.
Well, with music, most recording was record player or radio to tape in the 80's. The double tape deck mainly came in handy to copy C64 turbo-tapes.
We copied tape-to-tape plenty in those days. Also, how else you gonna cut a mixtape for your gf? :)
I didn't do that much, because I had disc jockey friends, and it was mostly before the double tape decks arrived.
Music records were the first digital thing to have ever been pirated, period (even before the net existed).
Music records were the first digital thing to have ever been pirated, period (even before the net existed).
That doesn't sound right. What are you referring to? Digital music piracy wasn't really feasible before the mid nineties, but people were swapping home pc games and apps on tapes and floppies in the eighties. I'm sure there are other, older examples of software piracy as well.
People were converting vinyl and tape to digital files as early as the 70s, and swapping them with others after floppy disks were a thing. And BBS systems existed in the proto-internet age before the WWW and commercial ISPs were created in the 90s.
People were not trading music on floppy disks. Digital music trading only became feasible and widespread with the introduction of the MP3 codec in the mid-90s.
You can fit a single heavily compressed mp3 song on a "modern" 1.44 MB floppy. Floppies had much less capacity back then, and mp3 wasn't invented, so the idea that people would be passing around ripped vinyl music on floppies makes absolutely no sense.
That's why you either used multiple disks for a single file, or you converted it to a very low-fidelity format; sometimes both. My dad has tons of old floppies with music on them. It's absolutely horrendous quality or MIDI from the 80s.
So do you claim that this is the earliest form of digital piracy? Because it's not really piracy until you share the ripped files, and you say that people were "swapping them with others after floppy disks were a thing".
You are clearly mixing up the timeline here.
What about the people who put wax on records and took it off and they could play that?
Still a form of piracy, just not digital.
Wouldn't that be the answer to the second part?
Is that what you meant by "off the net?" Cuz I thought you meant it as in "downloaded from" 🤣
aren't music records an analog signal?
Not once it's converted to a file on a computer. I was not talking about bootlegs where you just copy the vinyl/tape to another vinyl or tape, but the period where we had computers but not the internet.
ahhh gotcha
What do you mean by "pirated" and by net do you specifically mean the web or does the old internet and DARPAnet count?
As an example does guitar tablature count as pirated? What about the scan of a playboy centrefold?
this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2026
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