A compilation of stories about sharing, distributing and experiencing cultural contents outside the boundaries of local economies, politics, or laws
https://thepiratebook.net/category/articles/
It all started maybe 10 or 15 years ago. I remember that my nephew was the first one in the family doing it. He had a little USB hard drive, and one day he got a large quantity of films from a neighbor – things such as National Geographic nature documentaries, music, action films, and video clips. Computers were rare in Cuba at the time. You could find maybe one computer on each block. Some people who had computers started collecting and selling kits of digital contents; it became a way to earn money. You could buy one terabyte of contents, connect the hard drive directly to a television, and watch it without any computer. You just needed to bring your own hard drive to the seller and transfer the files at his place. You could even customize the package by asking for a part of it only (to save money) or for more specific contents (only kung fu movies, TV shows, games, music, etc.).
This is kinda what I picture sometimes when I go to the trouble of amassing and maintaining a media library (I can seldom bring myself to get rid of a copy of anything, even if i don't like it, and redundancy is a must). It has so much more value when it's shared. At the start of the pandemic i bought a projector and a screen on the cheap and I got into blur ray remuxes. I liked the idea of pirating the absolute best digital reproductions available on the consumer market, and they look amazing when projected (just wish i had more people to share the experience with). I would think to myself that there may be a time when all of this becomes necessary again, precisely to have so as to share. I thought of having a couple of 16 tb hard drives just to hold the scihub depositories locally, but yeah, too much for me.
I'm old enough to have been to LAN parties that were very similar to this. We would carry desktop PCs and CRT monitors into some guys house and play games and swamp media all night. Then USB drives came along and we'd just sneaker-net when visiting each other. It was just a cool way to share media on a personal level before broadband was available or too pricey for most people.
https://thepiratebook.net/category/articles/
https://thepiratebook.net/el-paquete-semanal-cuba/
This is kinda what I picture sometimes when I go to the trouble of amassing and maintaining a media library (I can seldom bring myself to get rid of a copy of anything, even if i don't like it, and redundancy is a must). It has so much more value when it's shared. At the start of the pandemic i bought a projector and a screen on the cheap and I got into blur ray remuxes. I liked the idea of pirating the absolute best digital reproductions available on the consumer market, and they look amazing when projected (just wish i had more people to share the experience with). I would think to myself that there may be a time when all of this becomes necessary again, precisely to have so as to share. I thought of having a couple of 16 tb hard drives just to hold the scihub depositories locally, but yeah, too much for me.
I'm old enough to have been to LAN parties that were very similar to this. We would carry desktop PCs and CRT monitors into some guys house and play games and swamp media all night. Then USB drives came along and we'd just sneaker-net when visiting each other. It was just a cool way to share media on a personal level before broadband was available or too pricey for most people.