Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

My dads friend used to burn random movies to DVD and give them to us. Eventually, he showed my dad where to get them and my dad showed me. I think it was the uploader axxo on isohunt that my dad would always download from. I nearly completely forgot about that, thanks for making me think about it! We really had no idea what we were doing, we used to use utorrent and everything. That family computer was riddled with viruses. It took us about an hour to remove some random extensions that changed our default search engine one time

Probably being unable to buy music when I was in my teens.

No job, no income, no way to get to the store anyway, and to top it off… half the music I liked I wouldn’t have been able to find anyways. (Fan songs/parodies)

So I learned that (free) YouTube downloaders and MP3 converters existed.

A bit later than that… NES/SNES games I wanted to play but those consoles were before my time. So I learned emulators existed.

So basically stuff I didn’t have access to otherwise.

Growing up in a 3rd world country. When my father gave me a PS2 it was hacked to play pirated games. We also burned CDs on our PC before that.

I lived in china and it was the only way to access loads of media. When I got back I saw the hellscape that streaming had become. We recreated cable. That and not owning anything anymore. So I still sail the high seas. Even if I wanted to pay the high price of 30 different streaming services it's a better more enjoyable experience sailing.

Most of the stuff I was looking for couldn't even be found on store shelves. Before online shopping and streaming, if it wasn't the latest release or biggest hit, you probably wouldn't be able to find it locally. You'd waste time browsing up and down aisles of junk only to leave disappointed, then try again at another store, hoping that by some miracle they'd have it.

Then I discovered that terabytes upon terabytes of content was available, nearly instantly and conveniently, on the internet. All you had to do was click a few buttons and you had what you wanted. That was about 25+ years ago, and the recording industry still has not adapted to offer a service that even comes close to what was available back then.

Intellectual property is the lamest form of property put forth by the propertarians.

I started downloading music, because it was free.

Over the years I've found many more excuses to justify it though.
P.s. Down with big corpo etc. etc.

wir hatten ja nichts

I started years ago when cable was on top to get away from ads, I stopped for a few years but since ads have been making a comeback I started back up, screw ads

My brothers were using limewire like 20 years ago when I was a preteen. So I started using limewire, and quickly surpassed them in skill. Jumped to TPB when they got popular. I now host the family media server, and take requests 😬

Still haven't taken the time to set up sonarr radarr and the like. Would probably simplify my life a lot. But I've got a system and it works 🤷‍♂️

VB 6. We were learning it in school and I wanted to learn on my own as well. Spent a lot of time on IRC after that.

Wanted to play some games, didn't have money but I did know someone that knew someone that knew someone that ran a BBS that had some pirated games.

Yes, I'm that old.

I was a teenager who wanted to be a 1337 haxxor so I found out what warez were, and then wanted to play a bunch of games for free.

Was born into it really. Got my first PC. Knew nothing. Slowly learnt stuff off my sis who was going into engineering. Thru her I met a guy who was dating a friend of ours. He was like hey sign up for this BB and you can get tons of free shit. He pointed to D2 which I played like mad. I signed up and just got thrown into the scene. Ended up being an admin of that board for a bit. This was around the time Oink was at its peak. Like 2y later, gone.

Went to uni myself and just supplied everyone with free stuff for school. Even profs lol.

And that’s just how I stayed. Felt good buying everything I used after I got a job out of school tho. Still use some of it today! But for most media, it’s just like why NOT sail. If movies were a buck a pop like they should be, I’d probably furl up my Jolly Roger. Till that day tho 🏴‍☠️

Basically as soon as I found out about it. I really got into it when I later discovered emulation. Never felt bad about it; I was pretty much only looking for games I literally could not buy because they could only be had via retailers, and they didn't always carry every title.

Having no money and deciding that shouldn't stand between me and media I wouldn't pay for anyway. Also my local college's DC++ network, where someone had about 20 TB back in 2006 (which was a bit of a culture shock after having been banned from watching most TV during childhood).

Hmm, this is an interesting question, as I live in a 3rd world country it is hard to pinpoint exactly which event drove me to this beautiful world.

With that said, the first console that we ever had (sis and I) was a PS1, it came with Gran Turismo and DBZ Ultimate Battle 22, I think.

Anyway, I was probably 6 years old, and my dad took care of chip it (took it to a place, it is common to do that in Mexico) and then I got the pirated games for dirt cheap in flea markets and such, a similar event happened with the PS2.

But when I truly sailed the seas for myself, at least in a gaming scenario, happened when I got my Nintendo DS phat, I quickly knew about a R4, and managed myself to find ROM sites, homebrew, heck I used to use Windows Live Messenger in that little thing lol (DS Lite at that time).

I mean, I pirated software for PC and possibly burned some games for the PS1/PS2 before having the DS, but having unlimited portable fun with the DS (and then the PSP) was when I turned into a no return point.

I wanted to buy music, but a CD that I got in the 00's had some "protection" so that I couldn't rip it and listen to it on my MP3 player.

Now, I ripped it from a Linux computer and had no problems, but was so upset that the record companies tried this. I realized that it's not about right or wrong, but just about power and money.

My dad introduced me to Napster and Weird Al.

Ssi randomly stopped paying me

When I was learning programming, free software for schools wasn't (officially) a thing yet.

Lots of folks pointedly looked the other way so I could have a home copy of the development environment I was learning.

When I discovered soulseek and could stop paying $20-$30 per CD. Incidentally, I bought an iPod round the same time and couldn't copy my mp3s over, and that's the last time i ever bought an apple product

Being a poor elementary school kid who wanted to play the trendy singleplayer games.

I think the first thing I ever pirated was Cars. I was like 13, They didn't have a VHS for it at the library and our home internet at the time was too slow to even think about streaming, so I figured out how to torrent and it took like 6 days to get a complete copy of the movie.

I ended up sticking to pirating and pack packratting all the movie files locally specifically because our internet was so bad.

I found a website that showed my how to use RSS feeds to automatically download TV shows. Having my favorite shows download automatically overnight was very convenient. There was no streaming services for TV shows back then and even if there was, my internet was way too slow for that. I had a portable media player with a massive 80GB hard drive that I could load my pirated TV shows and ripped DVDs on when I was away from home.

Availability, since I was a kid till today, most things are not available in my country. Convenience is a bonus. Price is a negative because my usenet/indexer cost is more than netflix/prime/disney and 2 more local services of my country.

Holy shit I also pirated DC talk hahaha. Wasn't allowed to listen to it .

What would people think of they hear that I'm sailing the high seas?

Originally, it was being a child and not having any money of my own, and my mom getting out her wallet to enter card information on a website she had no previous knowledge of, for something she would never use personally, was a whole... thing that I can probably count on my hands the number of times it actually happened. So I stopped even asking and figured it out myself.

Edit: also, we had netflix but sometimes the shows I wanted to keep up with were still airing and I couldn't wait.

Now, I just don't think any company that would take my money in exchange for, generally temporary, access to media/software really deserves or needs my money all that much, and especially not more than I do. I also strongly resent that there is not a public and legal domain for things that are older than like 5 or 10 years and not actively being worked on.

I really wanted to give Assassin's Creed Valhalla a try soon after it came out, as it had been a few years since I'd played any of the games. So I began looking into how I could get it for free.

I didn't really enjoy the game but what I discovered was much greater than just one game.

I started because I wanted to get around censorship in my country. I also wanted to view stuff in the original language and here we dub everything.

My uncle hooked me up with an R4 for my DS and 3DS.
The first software I remember pirating was Cinema4D.
I started my own media library with Jellyfin due to the increased fragmentation and price increases. Earlier I co-payed a netflix account with my friend.

But I still pay for my Spotify Account.

DLCs.

My parents were the ones who pointed me to the high seas. I was a kid (12-13yo) when Napster came out. Being the family geek, they told me to look into it since they heard about it on the news and wanted free music (early case of the Streissand Effect before it was termed as such). So I did. And we got free music. Even asked them to get me a CD burner for my birthday after that and they did.

As a kid on the earlier days of the Internet, I came across all sorts of ways to get free stuff. Games and Music at first, especially game cracks/warez. Then once torrents came on the scene, movies and shows.

I actually don't pirate much anymore. Rarely pirate music since I've had Spotify for like 10+yrs now. Same with games since Steam and all the other digital storefronts have so many sales. I still pirate emulator ROMs once in a blue moon. Movies/shows would be where I pirate the most (though like once a month if that), even though I have Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, and Crunchyroll. Even between those 4, I can't find everything I want to watch.

But yeah, 99% of the time, I just don't want to pay for things. The other 1% is that I can't pay for something (mainly in the emulators/ROMs space). That's all.

Overpriced, privacy-invasive streaming services that require shitty proprietary software to use them

Wanted to not pay for stuff. Still pirate movies and tv shows. Games not so much.