Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

As a child my parents didn't want to give me their credit card (like fair enough), but so I had to find other ways.

Then payed for netflix for a while and was pretty happy with it. Since you have to have like 13 streamubg services of which only about half are available on my country I found Plex. Now I use Jellyfin and couldn't be happier.

When my mom's old laptop became mine in around 2011 it wasn't even powerful enough to run Minecraft at more than 13 FPS, so I sure as shit wasn't gonna spend the occasional money I got on a steam card at 7/11 to load up an account I couldn't even use to play the games well with

I think every game I've ever pirated from childhood and actually liked enough to finish has been paid for now though

Just born to break the rules.

Back then: The prices of shit and ease of procurement. Nowadays, I’ll buy reasonably priced software because I’m not a broke dick and like to have support if needed. Though, understandably, there’s still a lot of bullshit software that’s way too expensive. But I lean towards foss software when I can get away with it.

But for streaming/cable/satellite? I’d rather wipe my ass with that money. I’ll go to the theater if a movie looks good enough, just to change things up, but with so much awful shit being produced… nope.

I pay for music streaming on Deezer, but also have a carefully curated media library and run Nicotine 24/7 to share on slsk.

I guess it’s a toss up between money and principle. 🤷‍♂️

Exclusive sports deals, geo-blocking, and the general greed of streaming companies that just keep increasing their prices while you don't actually own anything.

I made bootleg tapes for my friends. I remember Little Feat and The Band were pretty popular choices.

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.

Oh, you think seeders are your ally, but you merely adopted piracy as an adult. I was born in it, moulded by it. I didn't pay for anything until I was already a man; by then, it was nothing to me but expensive.

The peers betray you, because they belong to me. I will show you my torrent collection, whilst preparing to show you my ratio. Then I will set my upload speed limit to 0.

When I was barely a teenager my dad used to buy me games and 3d software (I wanted to make games and animations) at the flea market. There was a guy who cracked and sold software for a living. It's a family tradition ! I fully intend to pass it down too

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.

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.

Napster was a godsend, as I couldn't afford to buy music. I installed it on the school computers, and I had a sneaky little hidden folder with my mp3s. I'd plug in my headphones and listen over lunchtime. I eventually figured out how to use multipart rar files to put them onto floppy disks, so that I could get them back home and listen on my parent's computer. I was eventually able to buy a portable CD player that played mp3s on CD-RW, which really opened up the possibilities. Without piracy, I don't think I would be into music in the same way - I simple never would have had the opportunity to listen to most stuff.

Young and didn't have any money. Certainly not enough to blow on movies or shows. Since then it's been a jumping off point into learning more and more about computers. Networks, data transfer, Linux, virtual machines. I'm looking to get some certifications and get into IT now, and I probably wouldn't have the knowledge to do so if I hadn't spent my years on the high seas.

Back in the day, sometimes USA TV shows would not air overseas for months depending on the schedule. Often spoilers online would ruin some parts. Piracy solved this. Then they started doing same time release worldwide but you had to use buggy streaming services and the quality was poor. Then they tried selling shows for much more than their worth on a per episode basis. Piracy fixed all these problems. Netflix was a good, reasonable solution and then they all decided to dontheor own thing. Piracy it is then.

Its funny that even Netflix knew that the greed of others was their biggest risk as they planned to be streaming HBO before HBO and others caught up. Its a pity they didn't emulate the quality.

Emulation when I was younger (and to a lesser extent now. I own the vast majority of old consoles/games I have any interest in playing these days). These days it's near exclusively TV/Movies and pretty much entirely because of convenience. Between myself and the others in my household, we have near every streaming service, I just can't be fucked to figure out which one what I want to watch is on.

I really need to get around to turning my old pc into a media server.

I wanted to watch Game of Thrones, but I couldn't, because there was no legal streaming service available back then. (This was in 2015 or something).

That's when I discovered the Pirate Bay and its wonders..

During my early years of life, my late father used to pirate a lot of movies. And my brother went to same path as my late father. Saved a lot of time and money.

Hotline for the MacOS warez scene to get games in high school (circa 1999ish).

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 first wanted a copy of miitopia. But didn't know atbrhe time. Then I just got some nodded apks and game roms

Earliest example of me pirating was when my dad used Limewire. I'd like to think I used it as well, but I doubt it since I wouldn't have known anything to look up.

Otherwise, in highschool I would go to different sites to find cartoons/anime that weren't available on Netflix (or Hulu back when it was just about the only competitor). This was before I knew what sites were safe, so I probably ended up getting viruses without knowing.

Gronk found fire. Gronk thought good idea. Gronk shared idea. Fire never belonged to Gronk. Idea never belonged to Gronk.

When i first started as a kid, i just wanted games, shows, movies and music without having to pay for it, as i would not be able to afford it all. First movies from P2P-clients like napster, kazaa and limewire. My older brother taught me what i needed to know to get started with torrenting later, and i built up a great ratio on 3-4 private trackers to get what i needed. This continued until soptify and netflix came along and i had some more cash on hand. The initial service was good enough for me to stop pirating.

So after about a decade of being a landlubber, i started pirating again. The services are fragmented, they treat you like shit and using any of their services is a privacy nightmare. As this dawned on me, i regretted having ever stopped pirating, because now i barely had any stuff at all. I didnt own a thing, and i did not like it. So now i had to spend a lot of time building up a library from (almost) scratch. I have a jellyfin-server running at home with about 600 movies and some of my old favorite shows, while also picking up some of the new stuff that i want. I dont have to sit thru all the bullshit on netflix to find a show/movie i like anymore, and the experience is pure bliss in comparison. Still lacking a bit in the music department, but that is also growing and i again enjoy some of the music i listened to before that is not available on spotify. I dont exclusively pirate though, i purchase some music of bandcamp, games of gog (and steam) and audiobooks of libro.fm.

Next time there is an enticing offer that does not involve downloadable drm-free files, im not falling for it. Fool me once etc etc

It's all thanks to my older sister who pirated a lot of games for me including Garry's mod back in like 2007 or so. She introduced me to uTorrent (that app is shitty as of right now, use qbtorrent.) which i am pretty excited for. This is like when i was 7 (I am 25 years old now) and before the ISP restrictions in the US, we pirated all sorts of games, movies, etc. What my sister used to do is we rent movies from blockbuster and my sis used to rip the movie files from the DVD to a burnt DVD-R. We would do that every time we rent a movie that i've liked.

She used to pirate music too as well as pirate episodes of Supernatural before AT&T gave her a bullshit cease and desist letter to her. Afterwards, she stopped pirating media and it makes me sad to see this happen to her. Luckily, at least direct downloads are better than torrents nowadays.