I love this thread because it peels back layers of time. I'll go next: There was piracy on the BBSes! :) And let's not forget the binaries groups on Usenet.
I ran into a story about a guy in the UK that ended up involved in the piracy scene surrounding that platform.
The basic story was that in the UK there were a number of Amiga centric magazines printed. And in the back of them were several pages of classified ads. Amongst them were people offering to swap disks for disks via mail. You sent them a stack of disks and a list of what you wanted, and they would send you back what they had on that list.
So he put up a small ad, and got a few small envelopes. Over time this snowballed into him investing in multiple add-on drives and dedicating whole weekends to copying disks.
Indeed. In many cases, it would have been faster to drive across town and borrow the disk than to wait on a download. In my experience, with my 14.4k modem, downloading a 1 MB file took about an hour. If you're talking about long-distance BBS connections, unless you knew how to make free long-distance phone calls, it would be generally cheaper to buy the damn thing.
Human nature's funny. Societies have been fighting about the same things for a long time. My sister's friend used to burn and sell CDs and had pretty much all of the popular music from the time. If we go back further we can point at examples of 'piracy' brought about by the Gutenberg Press. (A beautiful machine by the way if you ever get a chance to see one operate.)
> My sister's friend used to burn and sell CDs and had pretty much all of the popular music from the time.
I think "piracy" is usually two different things: illicit copying for profit, and illicit copying for sharing. My first introduction was through sharing: cassette tapes for the vic20 and c64. Then floppies for the Amiga. Then BBSs (that where free to access, less the fee the phone companies took).
I think my first introduction to copying for (small) profit was around the time of the first affordable cd burners. Some people financed their cd burners this way -- and some made real money.
I never used Napster -- so I can't really comment. But with IRC and ftp sites -- things were again back to copying for sharing (no fee). Same for DC++/Direct Connect -- people ran hubs out of love, for fun -- and in many ways I'd say they were more distributed than torrent sites -- in the sense that there were many small (compared to the Pirate Bay) hubs, and there was more of a sense of community.
And again, no ads, no money involved.
I hope we'll see the rise of more distributed networks (eg: freenet) run by the users themselves, without any central orchestration -- and without an artificial ad-financed gateway like TPB. We'll see.
It's a shame Netflix can't just change to distributing torrents, as they'd never be allowed to license the content like that.
