Inspired by a post since deleted, I feel bad for probably coming off judgemental about the poster's taste in the movie that drove him to consider sailing.
The earliest desired media I can remember that drove me to figure out sailing was DC Talk, a Christian rock band. Pop music was not allowed in my house, so a Christian group was tantalizing and scandalous to a rebellious, young Vanth. Things escalated from there.
First time, it was because I was a kid that couldn't pay for the movies/music/games I wanted. The high seas provided me with a solution for that.
Then I started making money and Netflix streaming came along making it both cheap and convenient. I docked my ship and forgot about my pirate life for a long time. Everything was good, living a quiet life...
But then the corporate greed caught up and ruined everything. Streaming prices became absurd, content got fragmented to way too many services and they fucking started introducing ads.
So here I am, setting sail once again. I didn't need or want this, but they have forced my hand with their infinite greed.
Cable installer guy came to the house one time... Hooked up internet and asked me if I was going to Torrent or not. I had no idea what he was talking about as this was 2005.
Did some googling canceled my cable subscription and I never looked back.
Got off the The seas when Netflix was big... And then all that changed again..
So here we are again.
I remember feeling liberated when streaming became big. Dealing with potential fake files, low quality, or having something stuck on 95% with no seeders was something I wasn't going to miss when I ditched piracy for Netflix.... then the streaming wars began and here I come crawling back.
I'm on Usenet now. With the arr applications it makes it a lot easier and I rarely am unable to find something. Not to mention maxing out bandwidth and downloading the entire file.
Are we counting like Ares and Limewire? I just wanted to listen to music and could never pay it. That turned into software I wanted but couldn't buy. Then I stopped for a while and started up again years ago not wanting to pay for streaming
I haven't seen that name in ages. I think Kazaa Lite, Imesh and Audio Galaxy were the first file sharing programs I ever used.
TLDR; It started as a young teen who just wanted to get games for free; It continues because companies don't give two flying hoots about me.
Currently, I pirate because I can't rightfully give any money to these anti-consumer companies that will only victimize me. I can't own anything anymore, and this absolutely frustrates me. If I could own the media I purchase, I wouldn't pirate anymore. (by this I mean I wouldn't pirate the media I consume. I'd still data hoard because it's a literal addiction, please help!!)
I don't pirate games anymore; or better said, I rarely pirate games, and when I do they're ran in a VM with VFIO because I really don't like the idea of running arbitrary code on my system; even though we have reputable, vetted, and trustworthy groups. (As a general rule, I don't trust what I can't verify.) I buy all my games on Steam for convenience, and I opt to use Goldberg's Steam Emulator (which is open source!!) to store backups of my games, and this setup works wonderfully! I stay away from games with invasive DRM like Denuvo (I play these in a VM), and I've long stopped buying EA and Ubisoft games. The only forms of media I pirate nowadays are movies, and music (and the occasional game).
The pirates innovated and made content available long before the corporations did.
Before streaming services took off, it was the only way to get movies and music (besides some IRC rooms). There were even a few golden years where movies would get leaked to torrents in full quality, before the theatrical release.
Music too was easier to find on napster, limewire, and torrents, than your local music store.
Remember the wolverine origins movie? Lol I remember when the pre-release"graphics not completed" version hit the internet. Fun times lol
I had the Soldier of Fortune original game disk, but lost the box with the CD key. Mailed the devs/publishers asking for help, sending a picture of the disks, and they basically told me that I should have been more careful. Googled "soldier of fortune CD key" and ended up on one of those now-defunct websites which collected cracks and CD keys, discovering that not only you didn't need the key, but you could also just download free stuff.
Now I pay for Prime Video, Netflix and Spotify and buy lots of games on steam/gog, but I also created an app used by thousands of people every month to help them sail the four seas
Was just trying to watch the original Star Wars from when I was young and found out that it is simply not available for sale. My money is no good! Then I found this Project 4K77.
I lived in Japan when streaming was becoming a thing. Everything was region blocked, and DVDs were (and still are) horrendously overpriced for what you get.
I've been sailing the high seas, or at least skirting the shores, since the late 1980s when my classmates and I were swapping BBC Micro software on 5¼" disks! Moved onto PC in 1990 and carried on. I even cracked a few games back in the day :-) These days I don't pirate so much, and I have quite a collection of legitimate music and software.
Ironically mine started without nefarious connotations.... The family computer in the mid 80s was a minor novelty to me for ages, only good for simple text games really. Then...
My brother grabbed a cracked game toward 1990 off a BBS. The game itself I don't even remember, but it had a cracktro that stunned me. Graphics I'd never seen, actual music out our little adlib card... Was crazy enticing.
Being stuck in the Midwest US while enamored with DemoScene is a hell of a drug. Every few kb down that modem was like crack.
That then opened a new world of games as well... Things my older brother had no interest in. Things my parents obviously would not have allowed. You know... The Good Shit ™️.
Obviously once codecs caught up video and audio quickly became a thing. My closest buddy and I would burn stack after stack of CDs to take a spindle at a time over to share between us and others.
Then the data hoarding set in... What good is just having these shiny things for yourself when you can share? True joy doesn't exist without spreading it to others.
The sickness persists... Stronger than ever despite becoming a pessimistic old man. Multiple gigabit connections: check. 200tb arrays just for torrents: check. Seed times tracked in years: check.
Remember when 14.4k was the most epic thing for grabbing those disks at lightning speed? I certainly do.
Originally, I was too poor to afford software. Then my CD/dvd books were stolen and I couldn't afford to replace the media I'd been collecting my entire life. I bought an external drive, an s-video to RF modulator, a Bluetooth keyboard and connected my computer to channel 3.
Eventually Pandora and Netflix were released and I stopped pirating. I spent most of a decade buying all of my media. Then I tried to buy a complete set of Good Eats and it wasn't possible.
There was literally no way to purchase every episode legally. So I took the $500 I was going to spend on that box set and put it towards an ebay'd server and some drives.
By the time the streaming wars started to gain steam, I had everything automated, and was pushing 50TB of storage.
My wife and I were piss poor and getting finance degree at a third rate state college. I was paying my way with PC support. One day I spent money I didn't have to buy a Wndows NT certification book and used the university's T1 line to pirate NT 4.0 for myself and MS SQL and Oracle 7 for my wife (I also bought a CD of Red Hat Halloween). Almost thirty years later we literally saved a presidential election and are the ones keeping significant parts of the US infrastructure from falling apart. All thanks to piracy.
It was the early days of the internet and I liked Metal music.
To get me some legal Metal I had to catch a train to the nearest city for like a half hour trip, then walk around to the tiny metal shop and hope they had the CD I wanted.
And I did that. I bought a CD a week from the local store and went on monthly trips to the City.
But I also got them off torrents. Sure it may take a week to download a track but that meant just leaving my PC on.
So I built up a collection. I copied the CDs I bought. I made track lists of the best songs and made my own compilation CDs and took them to work at Deep Pan Pizza, and we would put them on while throwing pizzas at the customers.
I ended up with a DJ case of copied CDs which is still on my loft. They weren't all downloaded, but copying media is Piracy, and I made CDs for my friends. Fartknocker Volumes 1 and 2 are still talked about by my old friends because they were full of Bangers.
Now I have a Spotify Family account and every few months they add a quid onto the price. The other day I put on The Global News podcast by the BBC and it had adverts in it! I pay my licence fee for the BBC, they don't do advertising. Pisses me off.
So now I use Audiobookshelf for my podcasts. Currently I'm curating a music collection I've pulled from my old iPod in my car. Not sure it's feasible to replace Spotify but I can try
Everyone just copied everything from each other. Floppy, then Twilight CDs. Then came the internet and exploring music there was better than sitting around waiting for a song to come on the radio to quickly press record. It was normal when I was young to share, not really an active choice.
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).
