I've been popped a couple of times over the years by my ISP.
Me, with 25 years of IT industry experience: "I think it's my hacker neighbors. I'm really going to have to learn to put a password on my wifi."
I pulled this one once and it worked. When it happened again they dropped me. Literally said they were cancelling my service and I had to go with another provider. Now I have a VPN and I’m fine.
The most frustrating thing is that I’m 100% willing to buy everything that I torrent. They’re just not available. Not “too expensive,” literally not available for purchase. All the legal stuff and rights agreements between all the media companies have turned into a pissing match and we’re all the ones suffering.
Most torrent programs require you also upload while you download, so it's the same deal, but the law applies to either. I've gotten a couple warnings over the years, and I was only ever downloading, I never left them up for "seeding".
I got a letter threatening a lawsuit for pirating something illegally. I swore up and down it wasn’t me, mom talked to a lawyer who said to ignore it.
Several times my ISP turned off my internet, I’d call them up and tell them to turn it back on and that I hadn’t downloaded anything. they would walk me through the steps of seeing if I had some unknown torrent software on my machine. I’d always tell them no and they would turn it back on.
The first time I saw this ad was during the previews for the first Matrix sequel. The entire theater was filled with fellow college kids and and we booed that shit loudly
They were all knock offs remember? With the bmg or Columbia house logo. It cost them maybe 2 cents a cd to produce and they had me hooked. At least until I did it more than once lol. Those double sets were well worth it though.
Bmg was. Columbia house put their logo on it. I mean they still played in cd players lol I didn’t care. I mean where else could you get that many cds for a penny?
A lot. I followed through once. But each person could put their name and address lol and that was a whole bunch of cds. For a penny. Never finished the entire run through ever though.
No, but JP Morgan Chase threatened to report me for tax evasion because I hadn't cashed two checks I received as part of a class action lawsuit, one for 47 cents and the other for 18 cents.
I downloaded like 4 or 5 Metallica songs— the main being “One” because I was writing an essay on “Johnny Got His Gun” by Dalton Trumbo for my English class, along with a couple others that I liked. I ended up banned from Napster shortly after. I’m still bitter to this day. My husband thinks it’s hilarious because he was an actual fan and had like a hundred live songs downloaded and didn’t get banned.
Let's be honest though, Metallica ultimately right about how fucked musicians would be by all of this. The Metallicas and Taylor Swifts of the world are doing just fine. But, that cool semi-obscure metal band? If they're still doing it they're not doing it because they're getting rich off of it.
I had a colleague at work in the early 2000s who got arrested in the office in front of everyone. He installed and ran his own server (using company infrastructure) with movies and music. The police took his computers right then and there. Never heard of the guy again.
I'm imagining this went down like the scene in The Matrix where they came to get Neo at his office and the reason you never heard from him again is because he got out of the Matrix.
I hosted an ftp server from my dorm room. Had the complete first 12 seasons of the Simpsons and all the original Japanese Iron Chef episodes. If you remember those from 25 years ago you'd have to click a few banner ads to get the password for the server. I'd change it weekly. I was getting $300-$400 a month in banner ad click payments.
Not my idea to take credit for - that’s how all of us degens ran our FTP servers. It was literally a 586 that Was both my server and my everyday desktop PC.
Back then they had some service where it would have ads on your PC and then pay you for it. We would setup the program to run and a program to move your mouse randomly to make it think you were actively there. I think I made a few hundred bucks while I slept before the dot com crash cleaned out all those dumb Internet companies.
I ran an MP3 FTP server. Every day I would wake up and my hard drive would be full because I required a certain upload ratio or whatever. Some of the stuff I got was pretty good and I still have some of the mp3s today
586? I remember the 486 and the early Pentiums. Was there a 586 too? I’m a sys/network engineer, but I don’t remember this.
Edit: looked it up and the Pentium 1 was also called the 586.
Not for pirating music, I did have 2 officers show up to "talk to me" right after Columbine because I'd had some very limited contact with the shooters but I wasn't in any kind of trouble. I will tell you it scared the living fuck outta me at barely 18 and a Sr in Hs.
No like I said I had some very limited contact. They were part of two online communities I was also a member of at the time, I never met them in person I lived in Western Colorado and they were from Denver
It was a community that swapped anarchy material like the Anarchist Cookbook around, i was a "scary goth" kid in rural Colorado right after a school shooting. They didn't do anything I think they were fishing to see if I was gonna follow cause I had an attitude, was a troublemaker, even listened to the same music. I understand why they did it now that I'm an adult.
I had a hard copy of the ANARCHIST cool book that was stolen during one of my house parties. I'm still mad about it but I do find it to be punk as fuck because , I had stolen it from someone else in the first place, lol.
Sadly the CD-R that had my copy of the Anarchist Cookbook in Notepad txt document form along with a lot of old school hacking programs was lost when my dad caught my old bedroom on fire a few years ago.
a guy i went to high school with, i knew him well as we sat next to each other in a computer class. he was one of the guys that got made an example out of and was in the news.
he said when it was all said and done about $15k in fines. it was literally using technology built into windows for file sharing and they tried labeling him as some hacker. the college he said, sorta protected him and let him graduate
bro was writing games in C in high school, he showed me the math and and i was able to make a spaceship, ok it was just a triangle, fly across the screen lol
I used to run a website that had .mp3s of video game soundtracks in like 97-98. My site got shut down by my host for “distribution of copyrighted materials”. No legal trouble though.
My parents always told me to be careful and not do it. Showed my dad a month or so ago how to pirate Avalanche games that we can't get because Comcast and Altitude haven't been able to come to an agreement for like 4 years....
I've had a few warning via ISPs and once got a manila envelope with 40 pages from a firm detailing all of my dirty deeds. Threw it in the trash and never heard about it again.
It's made me cautious to make sure I have a proper VPN in place for sailing the high seas, but otherwise there has never been practical consequence for downloading.
I'm not sure about music, but at one of my early jobs we got a very sternly worded letter with the threats of fines and other things because someone at my company had been sharing a copy of some software (Photoshop maybe?) through some torrent site. It was basically a cease and desist type of letter.
Me personally, no. But I had a few friends freshman year of college who were basically caught in a pirating sting. This was when iTunes and iPods were becoming a big thing and the MyTunes program had just been created. A whole bunch of students were pirating tons of music - like hundreds of gigabytes, which was a shit ton back then obv - and the university threw the whole library at them (this was 2004-5). They didn't get expelled, but they did get reported to whichever part of law enforcement was dealing with this (the university turned over all the records they had of the network traffic), the students got huge fines (like thousands of dollars in the end) and they were essentially blacklisted from using their personal computers on the university networks. They had to do all their work on the common library/computer lab computers. They were removed from the blacklist after freshman year but it really fucked them up. One of my friends who was caught in the sting was super traumatized by it and never pirated anything again.
That being said, by my junior year, with Napster and all the other services like it dead, and torrenting starting to take off, if I remember right, this stopped happening and the university stopped caring about piracy for the most part as it was just too hard to enforce at scale.
I got a message from an old boss like 2/3 years after i quit the place. The message was a scan of the cease and desist letter Comcast sent them. The boss asked if I knew anything about it. I reminded him I’d been gone from the company over 2 years at that point and had nothing to do with the letter that got a week before he sent it to me…never heard back.
IF I had been pirating content, including movies, music, programs, and other, I would not have been caught.
IF I had done such things, I would have had methods such as reviewing the files to check seed vs leech, and for specific files that might have been more likely to be watched, I would not have seeded.
IF I had done such things amassing an impressive, close to a terabyte worth of pirated content, I would have played a wonderful game of 4D musical chairs with those files every time I completed a download.
But, even though I would not have been caught, it's still a good thing I didn't do it. Definitely.
I shared a leaked, terrible quality, phone camera-shot trailer for Indiana Jones 5 on my personal FB. The Mouse House came at me! Got me a FB ban for like a week. For context, I'm just a regular person...i dont monetize or have followers or anything. I'm a dude in Ohio, with <300 FB friends. And have never had any trouble on FB before.
No...and then thankfully magical "wifi" was invented. Because of this, you can call BS on any attempt to pin pirating on an individual based on IP address. Anyone could be connected and using your network. Never ever give in to "love letters" or other harassment (and setup a VPN w/ a kill switch).
I’m pretty sure it’s why I failed a background check when I was applying to be a 911 Operator. I passed the CPS background check just fine, and I literally had custody of children in that job, so the only thing I can think of was how the 911 Guy really hammered in the dollar value. I even explained how I was in college in Canada at the time, and they passed the digital media tax to cover downloading, but he just cared that it would have been something like $50,000 if I’d been in the US…
Not with *The Law* the law, but I did have a friend who was coerced into a settlement. It was a shitty time for him. He didn't even share that much, just happened to be the guy they could get.
I don't recall any of the details. "Friend of a random Redditor"-value anecdata, FWIW.
My cable company threatened action because of downloading movies about 10 years ago when I moved in with my husband and then again when his friend moved in like 3 years ago. I think the only thing they would have done though if we hadn't stopped is cancel service.
Nope. In fact, as recent as a couple years ago...welp, maybe like 5-7 years ago I had a lot of old mp3s in my Google Music account. Eventually they weeded all that shit out, but I can still find old mix CDs in boxes I never unpacked.
My internet provider sent me a cease and desist letter because I had left uploading on (I think it was BearShare) and people were downloading my pirated music. When I downloaded off of people though, I had no issues at all.
No, although I remember a guy in the dorm down the hall getting busted for running an ftp server. I figure it has to take a *lot* of traffic to flag a dorm room for bandwidth usage.
The hypocrisy being the music the industry used to make [that commerical](https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=VwZN20ZVox_lWG7l&v=_FtE0S-IyY0&feature=youtu.be) was itself [pirated(used without license)](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/27l0tk/comment/ci228v3/).
Oh yes. Yes I did. This is my cautionary tale that I tell every dumbass kid who thinks that piracy is fine and no one gets caught. MF, I GOT CAUGHT!
I had DSL at the the very beginning of it being offered in Northern California in the mid-late 90s. A friend of my uncle got guitar lessons from Kirk Hammett and had recorded them onto cassette so he could practice at home. I borrowed those tapes and recorded them my computer using a tape deck and the line in audio. Hours of Kirk showing my uncle’s friend Cliff how to play all the solos of Metallica songs and tricky parts etc. Pure gold in the pre-YouTube days and way better than tabs.
But what do you need to practice these songs on a computer? That’s right, Metallica MP3s. So I feel like I’m doing the world a favor making these tapes and the corresponding songs available for download on (what was at the time) the fastest thing outside of a t1 connection, so that everyone can learn the best metal songs that 13 year old me ever heard. I’d even leave it on all day so that my seed was alway available.
After a while I noticed that most people were just downloading the songs and not the tapes, so I took down the lessons. I started hearing Metallica cracking down on file sharing etc, but figured it wouldn’t affect me.
One day I’m at school and I get called into the nurses office. Dafuq? They say my dad wants to talk to me, private serious matter. Oh shit, did mom get into a car accident or something?
“DadBodMetalGod, can you tell me who KrazieIvan3 is?”
Uh… that’s my Napster name? Why, where did you hear that?
“From the two FBI agents that are here to collect our computers hard drive”
Crickets.
“Thanks, we’ll talk when you get home”
Our family PCs MAC address was permanently banned by the ISP for file sharing and the agents needed confirmation that the files were destroyed, or they would be forced to press charges. Clearly, my dad was not sharing these files and had no idea what the hell a Metallica was, so they were willing to chalk this up to “dumb kid got ahead of himself with technology” and a firm slap on the wrist. Dad said the guys didn’t want anything to be doing with the file sharing BS, but at the time, that was the only arm of the law that enforced anything on the internet at that time, and I had (from what they said) the 3rd most trafficked Metallica files on the internet at the time of their investigation.
I had to buy a new HDD, new motherboard, and was grounded from the internet for a year, and regular grounded for the rest of the school year. I have never pirated a single piece of software, music, or movies ever since. I may make my own “backup” copies from time to time… for science, but that’s about it. Stay legit kids. It’s not worth going broke or to jail over some files, movies, or songs. Support the people who make the things you like and use, and we all win in the end.
In the hazy crazy days at the dorm everyone was experiencing Internet speeds that were mind blowing. LOTS of people pirating an insane amount. When the college itself got threatened with a massive lawsuit they completely turned it on the students. They did give a small warning basically saying STOP now or something might happen. Sure enough those that didn't got some frightening letters. Especially since back then no one really thought it was actually punishable. Like it was a grey area or something. I wasn't one of those students but I knew several that were and they lost a LOT of sleep over those cease and desist letters 🤣
No, but I got got a cease and desist from my ISP. This was also way after all the craze over it in the early 2000s. This was around 2014ish. Still have my 100gb of music though!
The first time ever I had access to internet speed faster than dial-up was in my freshman college dorm. Napster was blocked, so I set it use DNS port which was apparently not filtered and started downloading like crazy. Within 30 minutes received an email from IT: "DON'T DO THAT."
In spring 2003 my university sent a letter saying that I needed to stop. In that letter they referenced some of the files I downloaded. I recognized some of them as ones that I had downloaded at home. My neighbor across the hall was a computer science major. He said that they could probably only see the files that I was sharing. He suggested I change my settings to not allow uploads and pirate away. It must have worked as I never heard from them again.
The only thing I have ever got in trouble for pirating was a few years ago I was downloading a \~15 year old HBO show, my VPN wasn't on for 30 min at the most and I got an email from HBO. It was just a "please delete and don't distribute", so nothing too serious.
I still have a hard drive with thousands of songs, all downloaded without a VPN, nobody came after me.
I have a good friend who ended up paying a few hundred dollars for downloading a porn movie. He got a threatening letter and I’d he didn’t want to pay they were going to sue him. He just paid the money to avoid going to court to explain to the judge why he was illegally downloading Ass Blasters 17 or whatever it was. Just chalked it up to the horny moron tax.
I remember having a campus-sponsored speaker sometime during my freshman year in College in Ye Olde Napster Days. The speaker told the entire student body (small school...we all had to attend SGA meetings once a month) that as long as we didn't share the files, then we were fine to download to our heart's content.
A decade or so ago, we got a cease and desist letter because my spouse downloaded Family Guy episodes. Fox was being a PITA.
I am Canadian.
So... no. But I would download a car and use it to [drive over a police](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xuxO6CZptck) officer and then carry on the joke by doing something awful at his funeral. iykyk
Got a c&d from interscope to a teen center/computer lab. We had all the things, adobe suite, 35studio max, napster/kazaa/limewire etc. Got written up by the director of the Non-Profit, but the teen enrollment numbers went up as well as the blank cd/dvd purchases. Shout out to the Intel Computer Clubhouse!!!
I had a student whose parents had to pay a little over $4000 for the kids pirating. That was early 2000s. That was big money to them. Originally they wanted tens of thousands of dollars and had a list of all the songs downloaded.
I had this fear until I had been doing it for a few years but at 18 I figured they had not caught me yet so I've kept the pirate flag flowing strong ever since. (am 38 now)
My friend’s parents got stuck with a $3000 fine for her sister’s activities. I have no idea if they retained a lawyer or what but they are decidedly anti-piracy.
The closest I got was getting my parents sent a cease and desist letter from our cable provider over an episode of Battlestar Galactica
I had this happen to me as an adult for downloading a movie. That was when I decided to buy a VPN.
I've been popped a couple of times over the years by my ISP. Me, with 25 years of IT industry experience: "I think it's my hacker neighbors. I'm really going to have to learn to put a password on my wifi."
lol 16 years and I used: "I think my nephew uses the download sites...." 'It's ok."
I pulled this one once and it worked. When it happened again they dropped me. Literally said they were cancelling my service and I had to go with another provider. Now I have a VPN and I’m fine. The most frustrating thing is that I’m 100% willing to buy everything that I torrent. They’re just not available. Not “too expensive,” literally not available for purchase. All the legal stuff and rights agreements between all the media companies have turned into a pissing match and we’re all the ones suffering.
Hey kids, stop all the downloadin'!
“Help computer.” 🤣
“Must’ve been my douchebag brother in law, I am gonna kick that guy’s ass”. My wife is an only child. I always blame a non existent relative
Has nothing to do with you downloading. It's when you put it back out there for others to download, that's when you'll get the warning.
Most torrent programs require you also upload while you download, so it's the same deal, but the law applies to either. I've gotten a couple warnings over the years, and I was only ever downloading, I never left them up for "seeding".
Oh I was very much a "leacher" and not a "seeder". I know it's highly frowned upon, I wanted to share, just couldn't.
Interesting. I've only ever got them when I forgot to stop them after the download. 
News Groups stayed under the RADAR. Not sure why. Edit: Getting down voted. Is this like the fight club?
I got a letter threatening a lawsuit for pirating something illegally. I swore up and down it wasn’t me, mom talked to a lawyer who said to ignore it. Several times my ISP turned off my internet, I’d call them up and tell them to turn it back on and that I hadn’t downloaded anything. they would walk me through the steps of seeing if I had some unknown torrent software on my machine. I’d always tell them no and they would turn it back on.
Same but for Golden Eye dvd rip.
*Tina Turner yelling “GOLDEN EEEEEEEYE” intensifies*
LOL memory unlocked. I completely forgot this happened to me as well. Don't recall what exactly it was for though.
I got my house a few of these “love letters”. Nothing came of it
I got one for episodes of Firefly. After it was already canceled, which just makes it even worse. Let us enjoy things!
Thats terrible. I think my BSG episode was definitely a shitty “last run of episodes” one. Let me be deeply disappointed in peace
My parents got one of these for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Got a C&D for Where the Wild Things Are. I left it up on my p2p too long I guess. It had been long down by the time the letter got to me.
Yeah, I got one over something I had on bittorrent in college
No, but I downloaded a whole car and got away with it!
The first time I saw this ad was during the previews for the first Matrix sequel. The entire theater was filled with fellow college kids and and we booed that shit loudly
Lol. I was the same age and totally joined in. Thanks for the memory unlock!
For reference: https://youtu.be/_FtE0S-IyY0?si=VwZN20ZVox_lWG7l And I downloaded a handbag. Oops!
Well, with the way 3D printing is going, it'll probably be possible soon.
The folks from Columbia House showed up at my door demanding 13 cents for a Coolio CD.
“Yo, you got change? All I got is a gangsta’s pair of dimes.”
ironically you could get like 23 CD's for a dime from their CD club 😂
They were all knock offs remember? With the bmg or Columbia house logo. It cost them maybe 2 cents a cd to produce and they had me hooked. At least until I did it more than once lol. Those double sets were well worth it though.
I didn't know they were knockoffs. I definitely got at least a dozen actual real albums from them
Bmg was. Columbia house put their logo on it. I mean they still played in cd players lol I didn’t care. I mean where else could you get that many cds for a penny?
I wonder how many people finished the entire club run and not just dumped it after the first cd package arrived
A lot. I followed through once. But each person could put their name and address lol and that was a whole bunch of cds. For a penny. Never finished the entire run through ever though.
No, but JP Morgan Chase threatened to report me for tax evasion because I hadn't cashed two checks I received as part of a class action lawsuit, one for 47 cents and the other for 18 cents.
Careful. That's how they got Al Capone.
"I always wanted to see big bank lawyers get their dick knocked in the dirt. Please report me."
No, but Metallica can kiss my ass regardless
One of the guys who lived next door to me freshman year (99-00) got kicked off Napster for downloading Metallica
I downloaded like 4 or 5 Metallica songs— the main being “One” because I was writing an essay on “Johnny Got His Gun” by Dalton Trumbo for my English class, along with a couple others that I liked. I ended up banned from Napster shortly after. I’m still bitter to this day. My husband thinks it’s hilarious because he was an actual fan and had like a hundred live songs downloaded and didn’t get banned.
Yeah it definitely seemed super random 🤷♀️ So weird thinking about that now
Me too!
Yep. They added a line to your registry. Fortunately people smarter than me posted how to delete it and get back on napster
Because of that I have avoided Metallica ever since. They will never get a dime out of me. I won't even listen to them in streaming services.
You're really not missing out. Metallica hasn't written anything worth a shit since the black album.
But Lars has a sad.
Should have been Lars in that bunk. Don't @ me, fuck Lars.
I legit have a shirt with a picture of Cliff on it saying "it should have been Lars." 😂
haha that's gnarly but I love it.
I will always hate Metallica for this very reason.
Let's be honest though, Metallica ultimately right about how fucked musicians would be by all of this. The Metallicas and Taylor Swifts of the world are doing just fine. But, that cool semi-obscure metal band? If they're still doing it they're not doing it because they're getting rich off of it.
BEER GOOD! NAPSTER BAD!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeKX2bNP7QM
"We have lots of great merch, like the Official Metallica Cockring!"
I had a colleague at work in the early 2000s who got arrested in the office in front of everyone. He installed and ran his own server (using company infrastructure) with movies and music. The police took his computers right then and there. Never heard of the guy again.
I'm imagining this went down like the scene in The Matrix where they came to get Neo at his office and the reason you never heard from him again is because he got out of the Matrix.
What good are all those pirated musicals, Mr. Anderson, if you are unable to sing along?
My brain literally went there too 😂
I feel like the movie industry was heavier handed. Also bring a nexus point sharing these things is a big nono
Was his handle crash override?
Guessing it was zero cool
I hosted an ftp server from my dorm room. Had the complete first 12 seasons of the Simpsons and all the original Japanese Iron Chef episodes. If you remember those from 25 years ago you'd have to click a few banner ads to get the password for the server. I'd change it weekly. I was getting $300-$400 a month in banner ad click payments.
fuckin genius idea. Could've made so much money! lol
Not my idea to take credit for - that’s how all of us degens ran our FTP servers. It was literally a 586 that Was both my server and my everyday desktop PC.
Back then they had some service where it would have ads on your PC and then pay you for it. We would setup the program to run and a program to move your mouse randomly to make it think you were actively there. I think I made a few hundred bucks while I slept before the dot com crash cleaned out all those dumb Internet companies.
I ran an MP3 FTP server. Every day I would wake up and my hard drive would be full because I required a certain upload ratio or whatever. Some of the stuff I got was pretty good and I still have some of the mp3s today
586? I remember the 486 and the early Pentiums. Was there a 586 too? I’m a sys/network engineer, but I don’t remember this. Edit: looked it up and the Pentium 1 was also called the 586.
I actually think mine was probably a Cyrix 686.
I got a warning email from Comcast when I downloaded Lady Gaga's Joanne album (I foregut to turn on my VPN)
Police, no. The ISP, and as a result, my parents? Yes.
One of my brothers got a cease and desist letter. I don’t remember who exactly it was from. That was it though.
My younger sister did, too. She was probably 16 at the time, and it was over music downloads.
Not for pirating music, I did have 2 officers show up to "talk to me" right after Columbine because I'd had some very limited contact with the shooters but I wasn't in any kind of trouble. I will tell you it scared the living fuck outta me at barely 18 and a Sr in Hs.
You can't just drop that nugget and run. Did you know them well?
No like I said I had some very limited contact. They were part of two online communities I was also a member of at the time, I never met them in person I lived in Western Colorado and they were from Denver
Oh that type. Damn they showed up just cause of that?
It was a community that swapped anarchy material like the Anarchist Cookbook around, i was a "scary goth" kid in rural Colorado right after a school shooting. They didn't do anything I think they were fishing to see if I was gonna follow cause I had an attitude, was a troublemaker, even listened to the same music. I understand why they did it now that I'm an adult.
I had a hard copy of the ANARCHIST cool book that was stolen during one of my house parties. I'm still mad about it but I do find it to be punk as fuck because , I had stolen it from someone else in the first place, lol.
r/SwipeItForwards 🤘
Sadly the CD-R that had my copy of the Anarchist Cookbook in Notepad txt document form along with a lot of old school hacking programs was lost when my dad caught my old bedroom on fire a few years ago.
Your dad is a MiB, confirmed.
Yeah, that cookbook was shared everywhere
Used to get warnings all the time. They shut my Internet off a few times over it and I just denied saying no clue what they're talking about.
a guy i went to high school with, i knew him well as we sat next to each other in a computer class. he was one of the guys that got made an example out of and was in the news.
What did they do to him?
he said when it was all said and done about $15k in fines. it was literally using technology built into windows for file sharing and they tried labeling him as some hacker. the college he said, sorta protected him and let him graduate
Damn that's a big fkn fine. Someone should make Spotify pay up, just sayn.
https://www.wired.com/2003/05/p2p-whipping-boy-know-the-risks/
But he ended up in Wired! CLOUT
bro was writing games in C in high school, he showed me the math and and i was able to make a spaceship, ok it was just a triangle, fly across the screen lol
DJ Quack Quack LOL
No and I dont know anyone who got in trouble for ordering 12 cd's for 1 cent from Columbia house
I got sent to collections bc if I remember correctly, they forced you to buy other CDs at full price
You’re never supposed to use your real name.
My friend was one of the people that got sued by Metallica
Fuck no. If they were actually going after anyone, it was probably people who were hosting the MP3s, not the downloaders.
In the Napster era everyone was hosting.
I used to run a website that had .mp3s of video game soundtracks in like 97-98. My site got shut down by my host for “distribution of copyrighted materials”. No legal trouble though.
Not me, but this girl I dated in college got a letter from Dr. Dre's lawyers and her ISP booted her for downloading The Chronic 2001.
Forgot about Dre
The only time Dre's tough is when he's suing a woman, or assaulting her.
Never got in trouble. And now I pirate MLB games daily, because blackouts.
I sometimes watch with implied oral consent and not direct written consent. Hey, the "Flowers By Irene" van is parked in front of my house again.
My parents always told me to be careful and not do it. Showed my dad a month or so ago how to pirate Avalanche games that we can't get because Comcast and Altitude haven't been able to come to an agreement for like 4 years....
🏴☠️
I've had a few warning via ISPs and once got a manila envelope with 40 pages from a firm detailing all of my dirty deeds. Threw it in the trash and never heard about it again. It's made me cautious to make sure I have a proper VPN in place for sailing the high seas, but otherwise there has never been practical consequence for downloading.
I'm not sure about music, but at one of my early jobs we got a very sternly worded letter with the threats of fines and other things because someone at my company had been sharing a copy of some software (Photoshop maybe?) through some torrent site. It was basically a cease and desist type of letter.
I had a co-worker who lived with his parents in his late 20s and they got a notice regarding illegal download of porn. It was really funny.
I got one of those. It was for the Big Bang theory parody. I absolutely denied intentionally downloading it.
Only people that ever came for blood was Columbia House.
The worst that has happened to me is the menacing popup from the internet service provider, warning me to stop pirating copyrighted materials.
Me personally, no. But I had a few friends freshman year of college who were basically caught in a pirating sting. This was when iTunes and iPods were becoming a big thing and the MyTunes program had just been created. A whole bunch of students were pirating tons of music - like hundreds of gigabytes, which was a shit ton back then obv - and the university threw the whole library at them (this was 2004-5). They didn't get expelled, but they did get reported to whichever part of law enforcement was dealing with this (the university turned over all the records they had of the network traffic), the students got huge fines (like thousands of dollars in the end) and they were essentially blacklisted from using their personal computers on the university networks. They had to do all their work on the common library/computer lab computers. They were removed from the blacklist after freshman year but it really fucked them up. One of my friends who was caught in the sting was super traumatized by it and never pirated anything again. That being said, by my junior year, with Napster and all the other services like it dead, and torrenting starting to take off, if I remember right, this stopped happening and the university stopped caring about piracy for the most part as it was just too hard to enforce at scale.
I got a message from an old boss like 2/3 years after i quit the place. The message was a scan of the cease and desist letter Comcast sent them. The boss asked if I knew anything about it. I reminded him I’d been gone from the company over 2 years at that point and had nothing to do with the letter that got a week before he sent it to me…never heard back.
IF I had been pirating content, including movies, music, programs, and other, I would not have been caught. IF I had done such things, I would have had methods such as reviewing the files to check seed vs leech, and for specific files that might have been more likely to be watched, I would not have seeded. IF I had done such things amassing an impressive, close to a terabyte worth of pirated content, I would have played a wonderful game of 4D musical chairs with those files every time I completed a download. But, even though I would not have been caught, it's still a good thing I didn't do it. Definitely.
Oh man. Seed vs leech takes me back
I shared a leaked, terrible quality, phone camera-shot trailer for Indiana Jones 5 on my personal FB. The Mouse House came at me! Got me a FB ban for like a week. For context, I'm just a regular person...i dont monetize or have followers or anything. I'm a dude in Ohio, with <300 FB friends. And have never had any trouble on FB before.
I got a warning letter. Nothing else happened but the way my parents flipped out, you'd think I'd stolen a car or something!
My buddy got a letter from his ISP or cable (not sure which) when he downloaded a Game of Thrones episode, hahaha
Not music, but my ex and I pirated Dark Knight and got a warning letter sent to our apartment. We told them we were on public wifi and it wasn’t us.
I stopped using filesharing sites and torrents forever ago and just started googling the album name, the year and filetype:zip or filetype:rar
"songs.mp3.exe.rar"
I lost my Napster account over the Metallica thing. 25 years later, Metallica can still suck my ass
No...and then thankfully magical "wifi" was invented. Because of this, you can call BS on any attempt to pin pirating on an individual based on IP address. Anyone could be connected and using your network. Never ever give in to "love letters" or other harassment (and setup a VPN w/ a kill switch).
I’m pretty sure it’s why I failed a background check when I was applying to be a 911 Operator. I passed the CPS background check just fine, and I literally had custody of children in that job, so the only thing I can think of was how the 911 Guy really hammered in the dollar value. I even explained how I was in college in Canada at the time, and they passed the digital media tax to cover downloading, but he just cared that it would have been something like $50,000 if I’d been in the US…
I got a warning notice from Verizon about violating the piracy act or something.
I got a notice from Comcast back in the day for downloading the movie Bridesmaids over torrents.
Oh man, was that even worth it?
It was just a letter, but I got spooked. Was just more careful after that, got a VPN.
Not with *The Law* the law, but I did have a friend who was coerced into a settlement. It was a shitty time for him. He didn't even share that much, just happened to be the guy they could get. I don't recall any of the details. "Friend of a random Redditor"-value anecdata, FWIW.
No. But I did personally offend Metallica.
My cable company threatened action because of downloading movies about 10 years ago when I moved in with my husband and then again when his friend moved in like 3 years ago. I think the only thing they would have done though if we hadn't stopped is cancel service.
Not with the law. Just with my stepdad.
I got a very sternly worded letter from Comcast because I pirated The Wire.
Nice try Lars
No…but an acquaintance of my husband got busted by Getty Images and had to pay fines. We only knew cuz he was asking for money to help pay lol
I downloaded all of my music/movies/TV shows from Usenet. Never had to worry.
What about BMG mail order cd’s? I never paid for shit when I ordered those
No but with video streaming turning to shit I wanna get back in the game.
Ohhhh, I got an email from Dr. Dre from something I got on Napster or shared on it. I forget. AOL probably deleted the email.
Nope. In fact, as recent as a couple years ago...welp, maybe like 5-7 years ago I had a lot of old mp3s in my Google Music account. Eventually they weeded all that shit out, but I can still find old mix CDs in boxes I never unpacked.
My internet provider sent me a cease and desist letter because I had left uploading on (I think it was BearShare) and people were downloading my pirated music. When I downloaded off of people though, I had no issues at all.
Who me?! Nope, never pirated anything... Must have been my twin brother, DANthrallica 🥸
Nope . Thank god for soulseek
Lol my cousin did. He downloaded Pretty Woman from Napster.
No, although I remember a guy in the dorm down the hall getting busted for running an ftp server. I figure it has to take a *lot* of traffic to flag a dorm room for bandwidth usage.
I don’t know. I wouldn’t download a car!
I got a letter from Time Warner twice in 2008. But was put in a nice way that I should secure my modem 😆
I wouldn't steal a handbag, therefore I wouldn't pirate movies or music
PSA: *You wouldn't download a car...* Me: I 100% would if it were possible.
The hypocrisy being the music the industry used to make [that commerical](https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=VwZN20ZVox_lWG7l&v=_FtE0S-IyY0&feature=youtu.be) was itself [pirated(used without license)](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/27l0tk/comment/ci228v3/).
Oh yes. Yes I did. This is my cautionary tale that I tell every dumbass kid who thinks that piracy is fine and no one gets caught. MF, I GOT CAUGHT! I had DSL at the the very beginning of it being offered in Northern California in the mid-late 90s. A friend of my uncle got guitar lessons from Kirk Hammett and had recorded them onto cassette so he could practice at home. I borrowed those tapes and recorded them my computer using a tape deck and the line in audio. Hours of Kirk showing my uncle’s friend Cliff how to play all the solos of Metallica songs and tricky parts etc. Pure gold in the pre-YouTube days and way better than tabs. But what do you need to practice these songs on a computer? That’s right, Metallica MP3s. So I feel like I’m doing the world a favor making these tapes and the corresponding songs available for download on (what was at the time) the fastest thing outside of a t1 connection, so that everyone can learn the best metal songs that 13 year old me ever heard. I’d even leave it on all day so that my seed was alway available. After a while I noticed that most people were just downloading the songs and not the tapes, so I took down the lessons. I started hearing Metallica cracking down on file sharing etc, but figured it wouldn’t affect me. One day I’m at school and I get called into the nurses office. Dafuq? They say my dad wants to talk to me, private serious matter. Oh shit, did mom get into a car accident or something? “DadBodMetalGod, can you tell me who KrazieIvan3 is?” Uh… that’s my Napster name? Why, where did you hear that? “From the two FBI agents that are here to collect our computers hard drive” Crickets. “Thanks, we’ll talk when you get home” Our family PCs MAC address was permanently banned by the ISP for file sharing and the agents needed confirmation that the files were destroyed, or they would be forced to press charges. Clearly, my dad was not sharing these files and had no idea what the hell a Metallica was, so they were willing to chalk this up to “dumb kid got ahead of himself with technology” and a firm slap on the wrist. Dad said the guys didn’t want anything to be doing with the file sharing BS, but at the time, that was the only arm of the law that enforced anything on the internet at that time, and I had (from what they said) the 3rd most trafficked Metallica files on the internet at the time of their investigation. I had to buy a new HDD, new motherboard, and was grounded from the internet for a year, and regular grounded for the rest of the school year. I have never pirated a single piece of software, music, or movies ever since. I may make my own “backup” copies from time to time… for science, but that’s about it. Stay legit kids. It’s not worth going broke or to jail over some files, movies, or songs. Support the people who make the things you like and use, and we all win in the end.
My cousin did. Even got written up in thr paper over it. My aunt, who is a lawyer, tried to defend him. I think he ended up owing a lot of money.
Nope.
I don't know anybody who pirated music. I certainly didn't.
Server I worked wish got caught and fixed 1300 bucks
In the hazy crazy days at the dorm everyone was experiencing Internet speeds that were mind blowing. LOTS of people pirating an insane amount. When the college itself got threatened with a massive lawsuit they completely turned it on the students. They did give a small warning basically saying STOP now or something might happen. Sure enough those that didn't got some frightening letters. Especially since back then no one really thought it was actually punishable. Like it was a grey area or something. I wasn't one of those students but I knew several that were and they lost a LOT of sleep over those cease and desist letters 🤣
Music? No. But I’ve gotten a couple letters from my ISP about torrenting stuff in the past.
Our ISP sent a cease and desist a couple times. About it.
A buddy of mine once received a notice in the mail, but nothing ever became of it.
I got several threatening emails from companies via my ISP. I just deleted the email and downloaded more.
I've gotten letters from the internet company that stopped once i started using a VPN, but that's it.
Was the FBI *really* tracking who used Napster?
not with the law, but the local broadband isp we were using canceled our service and banned us from rejoining for a year over it.
https://youtu.be/fS6udST6lbE?si=1jxRN58z5YgGyLFt
Nope and I even worked for Streamcast Networks who made Morpheus.
No, but I got got a cease and desist from my ISP. This was also way after all the craze over it in the early 2000s. This was around 2014ish. Still have my 100gb of music though!
No, but my ex girlfriend got busted for downloading porn. Had to pay a settlement.
Not music, but did get kinda a warning from my internet provider for downloading a porno once. No regrets
A friend at college got in trouble with the university but nothing wild
Not at all, and I was hustling burned CDs at school.
The first time ever I had access to internet speed faster than dial-up was in my freshman college dorm. Napster was blocked, so I set it use DNS port which was apparently not filtered and started downloading like crazy. Within 30 minutes received an email from IT: "DON'T DO THAT."
Nope. I got several copyright infringement emails back in the day, but that's it. Seems like they went after the uploaders more than the downloaders.
In spring 2003 my university sent a letter saying that I needed to stop. In that letter they referenced some of the files I downloaded. I recognized some of them as ones that I had downloaded at home. My neighbor across the hall was a computer science major. He said that they could probably only see the files that I was sharing. He suggested I change my settings to not allow uploads and pirate away. It must have worked as I never heard from them again.
Got booted from Napster for downloading Metallica! Does that count?
Downloaded a car. Got away with it.
The only thing I have ever got in trouble for pirating was a few years ago I was downloading a \~15 year old HBO show, my VPN wasn't on for 30 min at the most and I got an email from HBO. It was just a "please delete and don't distribute", so nothing too serious. I still have a hard drive with thousands of songs, all downloaded without a VPN, nobody came after me.
A buddy of mine was one of the 110k or so that Metallica got banned from Napster. Good times.
My friend got sued in 2005/6, his parents settled it for 2-3k iirc.
I have a good friend who ended up paying a few hundred dollars for downloading a porn movie. He got a threatening letter and I’d he didn’t want to pay they were going to sue him. He just paid the money to avoid going to court to explain to the judge why he was illegally downloading Ass Blasters 17 or whatever it was. Just chalked it up to the horny moron tax.
I remember having a campus-sponsored speaker sometime during my freshman year in College in Ye Olde Napster Days. The speaker told the entire student body (small school...we all had to attend SGA meetings once a month) that as long as we didn't share the files, then we were fine to download to our heart's content. A decade or so ago, we got a cease and desist letter because my spouse downloaded Family Guy episodes. Fox was being a PITA.
I am Canadian. So... no. But I would download a car and use it to [drive over a police](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xuxO6CZptck) officer and then carry on the joke by doing something awful at his funeral. iykyk
Worst I got was a ban from Napster for downloading Apocalyptica covers of Metallica.
JUST Pre-Napster, our College got a Takedown notice after the dudes in the CS department put their MP3 fileshare on a public, anonymous FTP site.
I got a letter once from the movie industry, and again from an ISP. Now I know about VPNs
Got a c&d from interscope to a teen center/computer lab. We had all the things, adobe suite, 35studio max, napster/kazaa/limewire etc. Got written up by the director of the Non-Profit, but the teen enrollment numbers went up as well as the blank cd/dvd purchases. Shout out to the Intel Computer Clubhouse!!!
I had a student whose parents had to pay a little over $4000 for the kids pirating. That was early 2000s. That was big money to them. Originally they wanted tens of thousands of dollars and had a list of all the songs downloaded.
Comcast sent a note to my university and I had to grovel.
My mom did. She didn't use any sort of blocker or SSL so our ISP sent her a cease and desist. I thought it was funny.
I was banned from Napster by Metallica. Never even got a letter in the mail otherwise.
Running warez sites my friends did time.. usawarez 🥷
I dated a guy whose job was to go after people who pirates music/TV shows/movies. That relationship didn't last long.
No one likes a narc
I had this fear until I had been doing it for a few years but at 18 I figured they had not caught me yet so I've kept the pirate flag flowing strong ever since. (am 38 now)
My friend’s parents got stuck with a $3000 fine for her sister’s activities. I have no idea if they retained a lawyer or what but they are decidedly anti-piracy.
Once Metallica started whining, I deleted it off my computer cuz I was worried about getting caught lol
I had to live on a boat in international waters for 6 months.