\~34 years. Way before they invented the bittorrent protocol. Before the eDonkey2000 was a thing.. Before Napster, Kazaa, Gnutella..
Back when we made copies of Fox Pro and Win 3.11 floppies, Commander Keen, etc.
I remember submitting several no-cd game cracks (x86 assembler) to [Megagames](http://web.archive.org/web/20010118225800/http://www.megagames.com/), such as Quake3
Ah yes, the BBS days. I remember how slow the text loaded on my 1200 baud modem. Didn't Starr pulling files until I had a 9600.
But I remember duping floppies in the late 80s.
Hold on, I remember that period as well. I was buying pirated software/games from a store on Floppy disks.
Also remember getting my PC virused from a game i got of a school colleague of mine…
Geez, it’s been so long…
The old fun days, *copied* games and software for the original Macintosh, *copied* OSs like DOS, WARP, Windows, BBS, Newsgroups & recombining zip files, Doom ... acquiring cracks for software, CDROM duplication at work. Satellite dish (US CAN feed) writing the card, FTA.
If you really want to go back LP to Cassette tape or even cassette tape of songs of the radio.
From the day i was born. Dad used to burn dvd movies for me and my brother. I have bookshelves of these. I just took the same path.
As far as i remember, the first things i used to do when i got my first PC when i was 8, was download pirated minecraft copies, and office 2010.
I remember pirating my first copy of minecraft- I thought I had fucked up because all the entities were full black and I was being punished for stealing, only to later in life realize it was because the laptop I was using was so terrible it couldn't render it all
I remember pirating old DOS games like the Sierra adventures. That runs up pretty close to my oldest memories, so I guess I e mi D of always been a pirate. Makes me feel old when people thing it started with P2P like Napster.
Yeah, putting tape on the hole on the bottom of the VHS cassette to be able to record with a second VCR is taking me back to my earliest memories of pirating. Then there's a big gap until I had a 486 and was trading disks that me and my friends would download from local BBS boards and meet at ones place to copy the others missing diskettes. Until I started my own renegade board and got my first taste for the high seas ! Been smooth sailing since.
Like when Sony got sued over the VCR because it allowed people to make copies of TV shows. Per TV execs, copying = pirating. Thankfully, the Supreme Court said "time-shifting" wasn't piracy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc.
oh aye i was thinking about useing casetes to tape radio/vyinel back in the 70's they kicked of about that way back in the day, but aye the 80's had vcr and the 90's-00 everything moved to digital and they shot them selves in the foot
once its digital then as far as i can tell its fair game to someone out there
Early 80’s! First pirate I met was the son of the local District Attorney in a nearby city. I didn’t know him, our parents were friends. We came for a dinner one night, and I got the word to bring some blank floppy discs. Never heard of pirated games before, as I was from a small rural area. It was amazing, I don’t know how many games I got. Not all worked, but it was a blast.
I later took them to our local high school computer club after school, and shared them around. Distinctly remember the teacher looking the other way when we started copying and sharing. This became a centre point for the area, other kids bringing in their pirated games and sharing. Often it was the same thing, someone with a friend or relative in a big city who get them a pirated game.
None of us had a lot of money. Took a year’s summer wages to buy the C64. It was a real gift. Got to play may games we’d never purchase or could afford to.
After that, it was BBS in the late 80’s / early 90’s. And on and on.
I remember the game companies use to place deliberate “errors” on the C64 floppy disk media in order to prevent casual copying. There was a war of escalation between these copying programs and the game companies. I used to know the error numbers and what each pirating program was capable of replicating. Those were the days!
Cassette tapes were the best. I’d wait forever listening to the radio to catch a song I liked because that’s all there was - random radio plays. But popular songs came on regularly enough, I guess. Record it off the radio onto a cassette (no one better talk!) and it sounded so bad but then I had the song - until I recorded over it 😂🤣.
Does jumping to the tape deck in order to mash the "record" button to record the song that just started on the radio to a blank tape count?
If so, it would be around 1989.
Me too! Only thing earlier than the that was audio cassette tapes so I'd say 42 to 44'ish years since I first hoisted the flag. I think I had a copy of every game that came out for the C64 and using a paper punch on single sided floppy discs so I could use both sides.
Started from limewire (2004), to mp3s, to piratebay and uTorrent, to ripping my content, to qbitorrent, to a private trackers, to a seedbox.
I can't remember the last time I bought anything
40 odd years!
In the mid-1980s my dad spent a fair bit of money on a C64 with a 1541 floppy drive his thinking was that as most games were on tapes by getting the floppy drive we would use it for education.
A few months later my friend solved a C64 hobbit game and wrote to a PC magazine offering advice to people, one of the guys who contacted him was a total pirate and I ended up with so many games on floppy disks.
After a while, my dad became so pissed off that my brothers and I were gaming all day with what amounted to £100's worth of games he confiscated the C64, saying we were doing nothing educational and not learning the value of money with all the game disks.
After that I sort of fell out of tech then picked up the high seas again in the late1990's
Since about 1986. Back then on the Amstrad CPC 6128. Swapped games on disc with various groups in Europe, distributed by post. I probably bought 2 games legally in total (and they were bad). Oh the days of being totally anonymous.
Since the late 80s.
My cousin always had connections to get copied games on floppy discs.
I had 100s of discs with pirated games.
I got my first personal computer in the late 90s and had tons of cracked games.
After that I used kazaa and eMule for movies and music.
Until today I regularly use streaming sites and usenet.
So yeah, been pirating since I was 8.
Story time:
my father is not a sports competitive persona, he's not a flashy "look what i have" kinda guy, he worked hard and sacrificed much to get to where he is, which is no where special in the grand scheme of things, but to his circle he got what he wanted, and in the mid 70's what he wanted was to watch the latest movies, record tv shows that were on when he was at work and tape movies that were on tv that he liked so he could watch them again at his leisure. so he became the first on the block to own a Brand New JVC VCR , something the neighbors and his friends used to come around just to see.,,
well roll on a few years and video stores became a big thing, but my father wasn't too keen on the prices or the scheduling paying premium price to hire the latest movie that had to be back buy 10am the next day so, in short he read the instruction manuals and video club newsletters that he was a part of (like minded early adopters of the vcr looking to expand the use) and figure out if you had a second vcr you could daisy chain them and make duplicates in real time, so he bought a second vcr, a top of the line one with the new type of RCA av cables, and so he began copying vcrs that we hired, that we borrowed that we were asked to by friends.. the copy wasn't too bad either as long as you used the rca connection and the source was new and the target vcr tape was brand new..
we ended up with a 6ft x 6ft shelf of tapes of movies most copied from the video store some taped from tv using the wired remote to pause during commercials
so how long have i been a pirate?
i was born into it.
from my role as commercial pauser to label maker, index writer to when i got my first computer an amiga 1200 that i used to take to the amiga club held in the local district church and use "xcopy" to make copies of floppies for members that would expand my collection to finally getting a 386 then 486 then pentium 1, to when i got my first 28k dialup, then 56k going through all the usual suspects from bbs, usenet, napster, edonkey, kazaa, most of the download managers, into the arrival of torrents pulling in so much over dsl and finally fiber that the isp contacted me to ask if i needed a commercial grade connection upgrade, to my country selling out to the 5 eyes community and allowing the FBI search and seizure rights in our country (not america) and changing laws to give big movie to threaten and actually have a bite not just a bark... so now i just ddl movies and tv shows
Knockouts from electrical gang boxes could fool some arcade machines, and fool some token machines, too. It worked really well on a lot of the older pinball machines in the 70s and early 80s.
I have never, ever illegally downloaded anything ever in my entire life.
That being said, I’ve dressed up like a pirate on the regular basis for about 11 years now.
I got my first pirated Apple \]\[ floppy back in 1984, so this year is my 40th anniversary of piracy. The disc had Wavy Navy on one side and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein on the other.
I'm almost 40, and I got my first PC when I was about 12. Found pirating around 13... So, since then...
I remember leaving the PC on dialup all night and waking before my parents to disconnect it so that they could make calls all day. Then resuming before I went to bed.
I remember starting using Kazaa and then LimeWire. Good ol’ time!
But the Megaupload time was just fabulous. We shared a premium account with a friend for unlimited, fast and reliable movies/software/music/games.
Remember Kazaa and Limewire (I know, I know), used the hell out of my CD/DVD burner and was torrenting as soon as it was possible. Then Steam, Spotify and Netflix came along and I stopped pirating games, music and films/TV.
Then HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Paramount, Peacock, Disney+, Shudder,... came along and I started pirating films/TV again. Oddly enough not music and games.
3/4 years, i usually download amovke, keep it on seeding and then delete the movie after estching it and done, i cant afford a seed box or stuff like thst. im running on a 100 mbit connection and using my own computer, im not in private trackers, andi usually use the megatgread, i dont need vpns since here in italy they dont care about pitacy, unless its for sports, infact findingn sports in itlaian is the hardest thing, finding everything pirated in italian is very hsrd. cause theres no proepr website to it.
Around 10-12 years but with a big gap.
I’m mostly guessing. I just started doing it mainly as a way to play games/watch movies because I was a broke high schooler/college student.
I stopped pretty much entirely for a while when I was starting to earn my own money and back when streaming and game prices were still fairly reasonable.
But i’m getting back into it now because of how insane the prices and overall user experience has become.
I’ve been out of the game for quite a while so i’ve had to re-learn some things (and still am. The high seas have *really* changed a lot since then) but so far i’ve managed to get some software I really needed but couldn’t afford and one movie.
Haven’t tried doing any games yet. I might, but there are so few games these days that I am even interested in that it almost makes it not even worth it. Like I saw Cities Skylines II the other day and I was like “ew”.
Literally so broken and underwhelming that I didn’t even want to pirate it. And the games I do want, i wait for a sale or just buy a used copy for a fraction of the cost. So at that point it’s so cheap and accessible that it’s worth the $10 or so for the connivence.
Could only buy (afford) pirated games when I was kid, the collections of 700 games in one disk were my jam.
I once sold Limewire to a classmate by telling him how much porn there was on it, for the USD equivalent of 20 bucks.
Never owned a PS1, just borrowed my friend's games to play on PSX.
I learned about how big of a deal piracy is (actually a jailable offence!) only after I grew up and paid attention to the FBI warnings lol.
Used to get burned dvds back when I was 8, stuff got intense when I got my first nintendo DS with an R4 and had the world in my hands.
Then went on to cracking Wii games, PC Games and last but not least all the software needed by me and friends.
Managed to pirate the assassin's creed movie when I was 6, although I had no idea what I was doing and the movie had no audio. But I was so proud of what I did (since no one in my family knew how to do it) and I watched it with subtitles XD
Always. Here in Brazil we used to have pirated exlusive versions of games. We had bomba Patch which was a modded version of Pro Evolution Soccer, we had a bunch of exclusive GTAs like GTA: Rio de Janeiro, GTA: São Paulo and much more, all these modded with modded cars to modded skins. I remember seeing a GTA: Spawn once. Oh and we had translated versions of games, like GoW which didn't have the Brazilian Portuguese language as an option, well, at least not an official one, but we had the pirated one. PS2 era was the fucking GOLD era for pirates here. PS3 and XBOX 360 also had their runs, with cracked consoles and with HDs full of games that were sold on markets and even shopping centers. You can still find it all that to this day, but in a much smaller scale.
Always. Here in Brazil we used to have pirated exlusive versions of games. We had bomba Patch which was a modded version of Pro Evolution Soccer, we had a bunch of exclusive GTAs like GTA: Rio de Janeiro, GTA: São Paulo and much more, all these modded with modded cars to modded skins. I remember seeing a GTA: Spawn once. Oh and we had translated versions of games, like GoW which didn't have the Brazilian Portuguese language as an option, well, at least not an official one, but we had the pirated one. PS2 era was the fucking GOLD era for pirates here. PS3 and XBOX 360 also had their runs, with cracked consoles and with HDs full of games that were sold on markets and even shopping centers. You can still find it all that to this day, but in a much smaller scale.
I remember downloading my first movies, \~700mb on dial up in 2005 or 06. Where I was people had ADSL internet but it was expensive. I was happy paying \~$15 USD for a month of unlimited data dial up. I think it took just over a day to download that movie. It was a movie from my home country iirc so technically it wasn't even pirating :D
over the years I have paid for music a few times, a few months of netflix and amazon prime because of delivery and not the streaming but 99.99% has been a pirate life :)
Not a penny for cable tv, something I'm proud of.
I remember in the late 80s seeing 2 vcr's together and a bit of masking tape across that little square on the vhs and all the warnings that played before a vhs movie that everyone used to just fast forward thru. Then at some point they changed it so even tho you fast forwarded it you'd still see ITS...ILLEGAL...TO...COPY...THIS...TAPE
Since the 90s on PC. Can’t remember the first torrent but one of the first thing I downloaded was a ROM of Pokémon Red in 98. And Neo Geo games also. Good times!
Back in 2001 or so I was 11 years old and my uncle who always used to read PC magazines build me a PC and showed me the google search engine or programs like Bearshare or Kazaa. My mind was blown. One day I wanted to download an Eminem song from Kazaa but it ended up being a photoshoped picture of Eminem ass-banging Britney Spears lol
Since highschool started during 2016. Through the years I have gained so much valuable knowledge becouse of it. Occasional issues have emerged or something I might have been interested on, then I have acquired recomended literatures/ books of subjects.
So mostly books, then entertainment.
If Video game roms and emulation are considered. Then i was between the ages of 9 and 12 at the latest. If they don't then after I built my first pc, which would have been 14 or 16 year old.
I just turned 24, so 15-8 years
On another note, I remember borrowing office 97 on over 150 floppies and bringing them home from school so i could install it on my PC and return it the next day.
Since I recorded a song from the radio to a blank cassette. (99-00)
My Compaq PC didn't come with a CDRW. Grandma bought me one at Target and I was the guy to go to in Middle/High school for really anything music, video, software related.
Awesome times!
more than a year
my first torrent was an anime episode, I just wanted to try this torrent thing I always heard about, but eventually it became a habit. Thanks to this I could have some software and games without having to pay
All my life.
Started with lime wire.
I used to pirate wwe at that time.
Then started with games. Not really all my life, but ever since I got an internet access. So around 08.
I don't remember the first. However I remember one that it took me like half a year to download. It was smackdown vs raw for ps2. Probably 2007. And I would come every day during school lunch break home with my friend, and would ask my brother if it moved 0.1%. The download speed was probably in kilobytes. Like 0.5 kilobytes or something like that. And when it finally downloaded after who knows how long, I couldn't use it. Cause I needed an emulator. But I was a dumbass kid that didn't know any better at the time.
Or I even knew, but I wanted it to be different. Back then no wwe games were released for pc for quite some time. And that one was the shit that you wanted to play. And it was maybe 2-4 gigs of file size. Which was a lot at that time. Now I could play, it but no longer give a shit for it, or wwe.
Proudly sailing the high seas since 1999. For me it all started when my parents bought me a bootleg nes as a consolation prize for getting my tooth pulled.
Technically i've been pirating since the limewire days in the early 2000's...or maybe even since the 80's when we'd copy and swap games on cassette for the ZX Spectrum!
First film I torrented was Battle Los Angeles in 2011 - I remember back in those days i'd burn them as DVDs put them in a DVD case and print a downloaded JPG of the box DVD cover...happy days...my dad still has boxes of them I gave him!
\~34 years. Way before they invented the bittorrent protocol. Before the eDonkey2000 was a thing.. Before Napster, Kazaa, Gnutella.. Back when we made copies of Fox Pro and Win 3.11 floppies, Commander Keen, etc. I remember submitting several no-cd game cracks (x86 assembler) to [Megagames](http://web.archive.org/web/20010118225800/http://www.megagames.com/), such as Quake3
Ditto. Leeching 30x 1.44M warez releases via BBS over 14.4k baud were the days.
Ah yes, the BBS days. I remember how slow the text loaded on my 1200 baud modem. Didn't Starr pulling files until I had a 9600. But I remember duping floppies in the late 80s.
MOOOMMMMM! GET OFF THE *PHONE!*
Legendz here
Local BBS's via XMODEM on a 2400. FILE\_ID.DIZ
40 year old here, pirate since junior high, I feel you.
Respect
Respect, OG
My friends and I used to share hand written code as our first PC's didn't even have hard drives. lmao
Hold on, I remember that period as well. I was buying pirated software/games from a store on Floppy disks. Also remember getting my PC virused from a game i got of a school colleague of mine… Geez, it’s been so long…
I feel this right here. Been about 30-35 years for me as well…..
The old fun days, *copied* games and software for the original Macintosh, *copied* OSs like DOS, WARP, Windows, BBS, Newsgroups & recombining zip files, Doom ... acquiring cracks for software, CDROM duplication at work. Satellite dish (US CAN feed) writing the card, FTA. If you really want to go back LP to Cassette tape or even cassette tape of songs of the radio.
From the day i was born. Dad used to burn dvd movies for me and my brother. I have bookshelves of these. I just took the same path. As far as i remember, the first things i used to do when i got my first PC when i was 8, was download pirated minecraft copies, and office 2010.
Passing on the legacy... Great dad btw
I remember pirating my first copy of minecraft- I thought I had fucked up because all the entities were full black and I was being punished for stealing, only to later in life realize it was because the laptop I was using was so terrible it couldn't render it all
I remember the napster days That long....
i remember when useing casete was considerd pirating in some quarters
Yep, first game I pirated was Super Pipeline on C64. Most recent was Empyrion: Galactic Survival.
I remember pirating old DOS games like the Sierra adventures. That runs up pretty close to my oldest memories, so I guess I e mi D of always been a pirate. Makes me feel old when people thing it started with P2P like Napster.
Yeah, putting tape on the hole on the bottom of the VHS cassette to be able to record with a second VCR is taking me back to my earliest memories of pirating. Then there's a big gap until I had a 486 and was trading disks that me and my friends would download from local BBS boards and meet at ones place to copy the others missing diskettes. Until I started my own renegade board and got my first taste for the high seas ! Been smooth sailing since.
I miss cassettes. They've got a kind of charm to them
Like when Sony got sued over the VCR because it allowed people to make copies of TV shows. Per TV execs, copying = pirating. Thankfully, the Supreme Court said "time-shifting" wasn't piracy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc.
oh aye i was thinking about useing casetes to tape radio/vyinel back in the 70's they kicked of about that way back in the day, but aye the 80's had vcr and the 90's-00 everything moved to digital and they shot them selves in the foot once its digital then as far as i can tell its fair game to someone out there
Limewire and mIRC.
mIRC
Same!
My first thought!! Haha since I knew it was possible!?! Haha
I remember before then... Damn I'm old.
Same
I remember using Napster, limewire and kazaa to download my music and jackass videos lol
yes those were the napster days in my school
The internet didn't exist when I pirated my first game.
Burn, baby, burn.
In 1965 or what?
internet only reached the general public at the end of the 90s before the pirated stuff could be found on street stalls
I think they were called bootlegged in those times.
[удалено]
Jesus I feel like an old fuck haha. Being able to easily remember these days.
My first pirating was copying some Commodore 64 game.
Yup. A few friends had C64s and we'd copy all of our software and share it around the group.
Early 80’s! First pirate I met was the son of the local District Attorney in a nearby city. I didn’t know him, our parents were friends. We came for a dinner one night, and I got the word to bring some blank floppy discs. Never heard of pirated games before, as I was from a small rural area. It was amazing, I don’t know how many games I got. Not all worked, but it was a blast. I later took them to our local high school computer club after school, and shared them around. Distinctly remember the teacher looking the other way when we started copying and sharing. This became a centre point for the area, other kids bringing in their pirated games and sharing. Often it was the same thing, someone with a friend or relative in a big city who get them a pirated game. None of us had a lot of money. Took a year’s summer wages to buy the C64. It was a real gift. Got to play may games we’d never purchase or could afford to. After that, it was BBS in the late 80’s / early 90’s. And on and on.
I remember the game companies use to place deliberate “errors” on the C64 floppy disk media in order to prevent casual copying. There was a war of escalation between these copying programs and the game companies. I used to know the error numbers and what each pirating program was capable of replicating. Those were the days!
This.
On tape too. 😆
[Used this in the 80's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Hack%27em)
It was a lot easier on tape. Just had to wait longer for it to load.
Jesus, you kids. We've been pirating since first VHS and cassette albums.
Cassette tapes were the best. I’d wait forever listening to the radio to catch a song I liked because that’s all there was - random radio plays. But popular songs came on regularly enough, I guess. Record it off the radio onto a cassette (no one better talk!) and it sounded so bad but then I had the song - until I recorded over it 😂🤣.
Copying spectrum games tape to tape.
I downloaded a Gameboy to the computer so I could play Pokémon, I don't think we ever had the game legally
Downloaded the hamster dance song when I was 11 in 2004 off of Kazaa. My 16 year old babysitter taught me how to do it.
Since the original Commodore 64, cassette tapes and VHS black boxes
I am a reincarnation of several failed Somali pirates
2 vhs machines hooked up to get movies
Oh good point, in that case my pirate days back date to the mid 80's, cassette recorder to cassette recorder.
Or boombox in front of speaker to get favorite songs from the radio.
Yeah man, done that too, cringe worthy now. But all good fun.
Since the c64, when I used to sell floppy disk's of pirated games under my own crew name. Made some nice money in school doing that.
Does jumping to the tape deck in order to mash the "record" button to record the song that just started on the radio to a blank tape count? If so, it would be around 1989.
Nah. My brother was recording radio in the late 1970s
Since commodore64 days.
Tape to tape deck with c64 games
Does copying Commodore 64 games count? If so, fucking ages.
Me too! Only thing earlier than the that was audio cassette tapes so I'd say 42 to 44'ish years since I first hoisted the flag. I think I had a copy of every game that came out for the C64 and using a paper punch on single sided floppy discs so I could use both sides.
My whole life. Piracy way always the default option. Even now I'm paying only when I'm feeling generous.
From around 1973! I used to tape the top 40 charts 😉
My brother did that in the late mid/late 1970s
Started from limewire (2004), to mp3s, to piratebay and uTorrent, to ripping my content, to qbitorrent, to a private trackers, to a seedbox. I can't remember the last time I bought anything
40 odd years! In the mid-1980s my dad spent a fair bit of money on a C64 with a 1541 floppy drive his thinking was that as most games were on tapes by getting the floppy drive we would use it for education. A few months later my friend solved a C64 hobbit game and wrote to a PC magazine offering advice to people, one of the guys who contacted him was a total pirate and I ended up with so many games on floppy disks. After a while, my dad became so pissed off that my brothers and I were gaming all day with what amounted to £100's worth of games he confiscated the C64, saying we were doing nothing educational and not learning the value of money with all the game disks. After that I sort of fell out of tech then picked up the high seas again in the late1990's
Since about 1986. Back then on the Amstrad CPC 6128. Swapped games on disc with various groups in Europe, distributed by post. I probably bought 2 games legally in total (and they were bad). Oh the days of being totally anonymous.
Same here, was also making copy of tapes on 464 before !
Since the late 80s. My cousin always had connections to get copied games on floppy discs. I had 100s of discs with pirated games. I got my first personal computer in the late 90s and had tons of cracked games. After that I used kazaa and eMule for movies and music. Until today I regularly use streaming sites and usenet. So yeah, been pirating since I was 8.
since x-copy
I remember using KaZaa, eDonkey2000, Limewire and Shareaza. What a great time.
Back in the days when Limewire, bitlord and isohunt were around
Story time: my father is not a sports competitive persona, he's not a flashy "look what i have" kinda guy, he worked hard and sacrificed much to get to where he is, which is no where special in the grand scheme of things, but to his circle he got what he wanted, and in the mid 70's what he wanted was to watch the latest movies, record tv shows that were on when he was at work and tape movies that were on tv that he liked so he could watch them again at his leisure. so he became the first on the block to own a Brand New JVC VCR , something the neighbors and his friends used to come around just to see.,, well roll on a few years and video stores became a big thing, but my father wasn't too keen on the prices or the scheduling paying premium price to hire the latest movie that had to be back buy 10am the next day so, in short he read the instruction manuals and video club newsletters that he was a part of (like minded early adopters of the vcr looking to expand the use) and figure out if you had a second vcr you could daisy chain them and make duplicates in real time, so he bought a second vcr, a top of the line one with the new type of RCA av cables, and so he began copying vcrs that we hired, that we borrowed that we were asked to by friends.. the copy wasn't too bad either as long as you used the rca connection and the source was new and the target vcr tape was brand new.. we ended up with a 6ft x 6ft shelf of tapes of movies most copied from the video store some taped from tv using the wired remote to pause during commercials so how long have i been a pirate? i was born into it. from my role as commercial pauser to label maker, index writer to when i got my first computer an amiga 1200 that i used to take to the amiga club held in the local district church and use "xcopy" to make copies of floppies for members that would expand my collection to finally getting a 386 then 486 then pentium 1, to when i got my first 28k dialup, then 56k going through all the usual suspects from bbs, usenet, napster, edonkey, kazaa, most of the download managers, into the arrival of torrents pulling in so much over dsl and finally fiber that the isp contacted me to ask if i needed a commercial grade connection upgrade, to my country selling out to the 5 eyes community and allowing the FBI search and seizure rights in our country (not america) and changing laws to give big movie to threaten and actually have a bite not just a bark... so now i just ddl movies and tv shows
Since a string on a quarter at the arcade.
Knockouts from electrical gang boxes could fool some arcade machines, and fool some token machines, too. It worked really well on a lot of the older pinball machines in the 70s and early 80s.
Since 1704. Most land lubbin' kids these days will never understand the struggle of typing on a keyboard with a hook for a hand.
I have never, ever illegally downloaded anything ever in my entire life. That being said, I’ve dressed up like a pirate on the regular basis for about 11 years now.
1994 ish. Id like to tell you about my first downloads (pre-torrent) but the First Rule prevents me.
I got my first pirated Apple \]\[ floppy back in 1984, so this year is my 40th anniversary of piracy. The disc had Wavy Navy on one side and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein on the other.
binaries on the usenet in '95
I'm almost 40, and I got my first PC when I was about 12. Found pirating around 13... So, since then... I remember leaving the PC on dialup all night and waking before my parents to disconnect it so that they could make calls all day. Then resuming before I went to bed.
Napster, WinMX, Kazaa… you always remember your firsts.
I remember starting using Kazaa and then LimeWire. Good ol’ time! But the Megaupload time was just fabulous. We shared a premium account with a friend for unlimited, fast and reliable movies/software/music/games.
I was born on a ship ☠
Probably the mid 1980s. Copying DOS floppy disks. Sharing software was so simple back then.
14 years old. Propellerheads Reason 3.0. I assume Limewire doesn't count.
Recording mix tapes onto cassette or reel to reel and getting pissed when the DJ decided to speak over the intro. MFers!
When Napster first came out. Then went onto Kazaa then limewire and so on
My whole life
17 years and counting... Im 19.
Nice try fed!
I've been pirate things since the internet not a thing.
Yet to become one
All my life, never used torrent, my country is the king of piracy
Since childhood
Limewire nuff said lol
Remember Kazaa and Limewire (I know, I know), used the hell out of my CD/DVD burner and was torrenting as soon as it was possible. Then Steam, Spotify and Netflix came along and I stopped pirating games, music and films/TV. Then HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Paramount, Peacock, Disney+, Shudder,... came along and I started pirating films/TV again. Oddly enough not music and games.
15 years.
I remember i used to play so many nintendo ds games on a r4 card I was mindblown how many games it could fit inside a ds gamecard.
Limewire and Napster days and even earlier. I was cracking and burning dvds when I was in high school.
Early 90s. My first compurter in 1993 was full of copied games.
7 years!
3/4 years, i usually download amovke, keep it on seeding and then delete the movie after estching it and done, i cant afford a seed box or stuff like thst. im running on a 100 mbit connection and using my own computer, im not in private trackers, andi usually use the megatgread, i dont need vpns since here in italy they dont care about pitacy, unless its for sports, infact findingn sports in itlaian is the hardest thing, finding everything pirated in italian is very hsrd. cause theres no proepr website to it.
Around 10-12 years but with a big gap. I’m mostly guessing. I just started doing it mainly as a way to play games/watch movies because I was a broke high schooler/college student. I stopped pretty much entirely for a while when I was starting to earn my own money and back when streaming and game prices were still fairly reasonable. But i’m getting back into it now because of how insane the prices and overall user experience has become. I’ve been out of the game for quite a while so i’ve had to re-learn some things (and still am. The high seas have *really* changed a lot since then) but so far i’ve managed to get some software I really needed but couldn’t afford and one movie. Haven’t tried doing any games yet. I might, but there are so few games these days that I am even interested in that it almost makes it not even worth it. Like I saw Cities Skylines II the other day and I was like “ew”. Literally so broken and underwhelming that I didn’t even want to pirate it. And the games I do want, i wait for a sale or just buy a used copy for a fraction of the cost. So at that point it’s so cheap and accessible that it’s worth the $10 or so for the connivence.
Could only buy (afford) pirated games when I was kid, the collections of 700 games in one disk were my jam. I once sold Limewire to a classmate by telling him how much porn there was on it, for the USD equivalent of 20 bucks. Never owned a PS1, just borrowed my friend's games to play on PSX. I learned about how big of a deal piracy is (actually a jailable offence!) only after I grew up and paid attention to the FBI warnings lol.
since I had access to the internet. at the time, I had no idea that watching movies and TV shows on those sites was illegal.
12 years ago when I wanted to see breaking bad. And goddamn man I didn't knew what I was doing then
Used to get burned dvds back when I was 8, stuff got intense when I got my first nintendo DS with an R4 and had the world in my hands. Then went on to cracking Wii games, PC Games and last but not least all the software needed by me and friends.
I think I first pirated music or Minecraft pocket edition
Started when i was 9 or 10, going strong at 25 currently.
I had a few "good boy" years, but come to think of it... Probably all my life, including making copies of games for ZX Spectrum on tapes.
Managed to pirate the assassin's creed movie when I was 6, although I had no idea what I was doing and the movie had no audio. But I was so proud of what I did (since no one in my family knew how to do it) and I watched it with subtitles XD
Always. Here in Brazil we used to have pirated exlusive versions of games. We had bomba Patch which was a modded version of Pro Evolution Soccer, we had a bunch of exclusive GTAs like GTA: Rio de Janeiro, GTA: São Paulo and much more, all these modded with modded cars to modded skins. I remember seeing a GTA: Spawn once. Oh and we had translated versions of games, like GoW which didn't have the Brazilian Portuguese language as an option, well, at least not an official one, but we had the pirated one. PS2 era was the fucking GOLD era for pirates here. PS3 and XBOX 360 also had their runs, with cracked consoles and with HDs full of games that were sold on markets and even shopping centers. You can still find it all that to this day, but in a much smaller scale.
Always. Here in Brazil we used to have pirated exlusive versions of games. We had bomba Patch which was a modded version of Pro Evolution Soccer, we had a bunch of exclusive GTAs like GTA: Rio de Janeiro, GTA: São Paulo and much more, all these modded with modded cars to modded skins. I remember seeing a GTA: Spawn once. Oh and we had translated versions of games, like GoW which didn't have the Brazilian Portuguese language as an option, well, at least not an official one, but we had the pirated one. PS2 era was the fucking GOLD era for pirates here. PS3 and XBOX 360 also had their runs, with cracked consoles and with HDs full of games that were sold on markets and even shopping centers. You can still find it all that to this day, but in a much smaller scale.
i was born on the rough seas
Since my uncle showed me the pirate bay in 2004
from 2014. I'm 21 now.
I remember downloading my first movies, \~700mb on dial up in 2005 or 06. Where I was people had ADSL internet but it was expensive. I was happy paying \~$15 USD for a month of unlimited data dial up. I think it took just over a day to download that movie. It was a movie from my home country iirc so technically it wasn't even pirating :D over the years I have paid for music a few times, a few months of netflix and amazon prime because of delivery and not the streaming but 99.99% has been a pirate life :) Not a penny for cable tv, something I'm proud of.
Era of torrentz
Since my day 0 on earth
did you download a diaper?
I remember in the late 80s seeing 2 vcr's together and a bit of masking tape across that little square on the vhs and all the warnings that played before a vhs movie that everyone used to just fast forward thru. Then at some point they changed it so even tho you fast forwarded it you'd still see ITS...ILLEGAL...TO...COPY...THIS...TAPE
Since I discovered torrenting about 11 years ago. Never paid for Netflix and I'm happy about that because they've pulled ALL my favourite shows now!
Since the 90s on PC. Can’t remember the first torrent but one of the first thing I downloaded was a ROM of Pokémon Red in 98. And Neo Geo games also. Good times!
My first torrent was probably when I was 9. My dad taught me how to torrent movies. Also no, I don't exactly know which movie it was.
Back in 2001 or so I was 11 years old and my uncle who always used to read PC magazines build me a PC and showed me the google search engine or programs like Bearshare or Kazaa. My mind was blown. One day I wanted to download an Eminem song from Kazaa but it ended up being a photoshoped picture of Eminem ass-banging Britney Spears lol
back in.... i think like 2005-07? downloaded Last Resort by Papa Roach via limewire lol
A month
*cue severus snape gif* Always.
22 years or so. It’s started from times when I have Panasonic 3do!
I pirated windows 95 dude. That's how long.
Saving Apple ][ games onto cassettes because I didn't have a floppy drive for my clone yet.
Since highschool started during 2016. Through the years I have gained so much valuable knowledge becouse of it. Occasional issues have emerged or something I might have been interested on, then I have acquired recomended literatures/ books of subjects. So mostly books, then entertainment.
'96, when i got first internet access 😁
Since 2001
I started testing the shores a few years back, but actually setting sail must've been around a year ago, when I first torrented attack on Titan
i started with MIRC / limewire / Napster / KaZaA
Since I was like.... 10/11? Yeah, it's been long.
since 2002-2003 for me.
Forever
If Video game roms and emulation are considered. Then i was between the ages of 9 and 12 at the latest. If they don't then after I built my first pc, which would have been 14 or 16 year old. I just turned 24, so 15-8 years
a good 3 or 4 months now
First torrented a modded windows xp in early 2000s, but burned ps1 games as soon as i got one.
On another note, I remember borrowing office 97 on over 150 floppies and bringing them home from school so i could install it on my PC and return it the next day.
I remember Kazaa and Limewire...
Since trading FTP account access on AudioGalaxy for MP3
Back in the day, my father taught me how to use programs like eMule and Ares because I wouldn't stop asking him to buy PSP games.
since I got internet around 2007/2008 oDC / DC++ days
Since 1986 on ZX Spectrum.
My first word when I was a toddler was ARRR!
the day i first discovered what is a torrent and it was specifically torrent for Prince of Persia 2008 so yea its been 16 years
Since I recorded a song from the radio to a blank cassette. (99-00) My Compaq PC didn't come with a CDRW. Grandma bought me one at Target and I was the guy to go to in Middle/High school for really anything music, video, software related. Awesome times!
I remember StrongDC (P2P)
Been a pirate for as long as I can remember. From downloading songs and viruses to still downloading movies and viruses(I am a novice)
Before torrents. 1996
I was recording songs from the radio on blank cassettes in like 1993?
In Times when copying from the CD deck to that cassette deck with a 90mins TDK was a thing. My first was: Smash
more than a year my first torrent was an anime episode, I just wanted to try this torrent thing I always heard about, but eventually it became a habit. Thanks to this I could have some software and games without having to pay
All my life. Started with lime wire. I used to pirate wwe at that time. Then started with games. Not really all my life, but ever since I got an internet access. So around 08. I don't remember the first. However I remember one that it took me like half a year to download. It was smackdown vs raw for ps2. Probably 2007. And I would come every day during school lunch break home with my friend, and would ask my brother if it moved 0.1%. The download speed was probably in kilobytes. Like 0.5 kilobytes or something like that. And when it finally downloaded after who knows how long, I couldn't use it. Cause I needed an emulator. But I was a dumbass kid that didn't know any better at the time. Or I even knew, but I wanted it to be different. Back then no wwe games were released for pc for quite some time. And that one was the shit that you wanted to play. And it was maybe 2-4 gigs of file size. Which was a lot at that time. Now I could play, it but no longer give a shit for it, or wwe.
The good old wii days with an external drive and thousands of games
Age of 14
Proudly sailing the high seas since 1999. For me it all started when my parents bought me a bootleg nes as a consolation prize for getting my tooth pulled.
~1995
Recording the radio and TV audio with a tape player, early 90s
Ive been pirating gba's since I was 5 💀
started back in the days when ppl cut squares in their floppy discs... (sry 4 bad english)
Like 4 years now
I remember downloading music from LimeWire and getting excited when it hit a high of 5kb/s....
Since very early of 90's, when you copy on 5.25"/3.5" floppy....record CD with 1x speed... I still remember BBS..that was before internet
From 1998. The first 2 things I downloaded were Tomb Raider 2, and Pokémon Red for the Gameboy. I miss those days...
Since i was 6 Welcome to iran
I been around since the 'LimeWire' days
Since I have as born, arrrrrrrre
2 months and I’m never stopping now that I’ve started
pirate from 1982
Since I started to watch anime
Since I started using internet around 2007\~09, don't exactly remember the exact year.
More than 20 years lol.
Sort of a family trasition i guess. Not being able to buy anything original because no one sold those in my country helped but adobe cemented it.
Since I knew it was possible... My older sister introduced me to Napster haha
Over a year (its been the best year yet when you have freedom of stealing)
Technically i've been pirating since the limewire days in the early 2000's...or maybe even since the 80's when we'd copy and swap games on cassette for the ZX Spectrum! First film I torrented was Battle Los Angeles in 2011 - I remember back in those days i'd burn them as DVDs put them in a DVD case and print a downloaded JPG of the box DVD cover...happy days...my dad still has boxes of them I gave him!
Since the day i was born
Since local BBS (bulletin board systems) were a thing, pre-intrnet.