cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/30015573
History? That's cute.
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2026
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OP must be a 2000s kid, because we were definitely pirating stuff over the Internet long before that.
They also didn't mention Netflix's DVD service, nor that it was really Steam that did what they described.
OP says ~2007 internet (asumming bandwidth and avail content) got good enough to become mainstem, not that I started around then.
I would argue that what Steam did for video games is what Netflix did for movies and tv shows. They made the legal option way more convenient and affordable it wasn't worth the hassle to pirate. That has changed now (at least in Netflix's case).
Can confirm we definitely did not pirate anything before 2007.
Anyone who had a dual cassette deck back in the 80's didn't have much issue copying music or game cassettes. Floppy disks were easy to copy too.
It's not fully accurate to lay the blame at the feet of Netflix. At the time, they just saw the writing on the wall and did what they had to do to survive. Their catalog was massive because, early on, no one thought streaming would work. They had a massive collection of shows and movies that didn't pull enough of an audience to air on TV for ad revenue. Netflix was able to get a TON of long-term deals that they used to grow, but when those contracts were coming due, the rights holders pulled out and started trying to make their own services. At that point, Netflix basically had to become a studio and pivot to original content, or else they wouldn't have content at all.
The long and the short of it is that because Netflix was first, it got to set the stage for the golden age of streaming, but because it worked, it was inevitable that streaming would become cable.
It's not Netflix's fault. It's just the course of the entertainment business. They suck now, but back then, I couldn't think of a single bad thing to say about them... well, maybe that they got rid of the 5-star rating system. That system was definitely used to get metrics for their early programming.
For me, there was never any move to netflix or any streaming. Piracy has always been cheap and convenient, and I don't want to deal with big corps
Also, piracy not popular before 2007? Pirate dvd/cd/vhs/etc stands were a very popular thing, at least around here. There was already a lot of piracy before the internet became popular
I never used netflix either. Their DRM won't let me watch in 1080p because I'm not using a spyware infested browser and OS. Back when they had a good selection, my internet was too slow to stream HD video anyways.
Yeah piracy was everywhere during the cassette tape and floppy disk era, I don't think it just was called piracy yet back then
Bootlegging is what we called it as kids
It was also called piracy back then too. It was incredibly common on the Commodore 64 starting in the 80s . They'd often call themselves crackers, because you needed to crack the piracy protection to be able to copy disks.
Those disks and even cassettes would then be shared from person to person or sold in shops or on second hand markets. AFAIK this is also when 1337/leet became popularised, to avoid censorship on BBSes, where file sharing was also possible.
For example, a magazine from 1991:
Note the group is called Elite productions and they call themselves pirates. There's also mention of crackers, specific events, and I especially enjoy that a piracy/cracking group felt it necessary to add a copyright logo next to the name of their piracy group which was called Elite Productions.
There was plenty of it going on around here. Even after Napster was taken down, there was Kazaa, Limewire, and your choice of Gnutella client. It was mostly us downloading stuff to listen to on the bus because high speed internet was rare unless you were in a city.
Piracy didn't start in 2006, before that there was likewise and Napster, and before that bootleg DVDs, and before that the MPAA spent billions lobbying to ban VHSs with a record function and get draconian punishments for recording movies.
I was downloading cracked video games from BBSes in the early '80s.
C64?
Atari 800.
Almost 50 years ago...
When's your next prostate check?
That's between me and your dad's penis
The order here is a little wrong, but it's mostly correct.
Production houses started to see Netflix raking in cash hand over fist and decided that they could do that too and started pulling their shows.
This made Netflix need to pivot hard into in-house content in order to not look like a barren wasteland.
I watched so much scifi on Netflix back in the day. It was really an end of an era moment when they lost Star Trek and Stargate.
Yeah I was about 5 seasons into stargate when it left. Later added it to Jellyfin, ezpz. You can go pretty far with a library card, or a vpn, or Usenet, or…