• frongt@lemmy.zip
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • Sʏʟᴇɴᴄᴇ@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      11 hours ago

      I reckon Napster was the first instance of piracy entering pop culture and that was in the late 90s. Of course it existed long before that (think anti-piracy measures from PC games in the 80s), but I would point to that as the pivotal moment.

    • chickenf622@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      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).

    • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus
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      2 days ago

      I remember me being 14 and distributing stacks of 3,5" 1,44Mb floppies filled with copies of Doom to whoever wanted one, as long as i got the disks back later on

    • quickenparalysespunk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 days ago

      ahhh, the halcyon days of downloading Utada mp3s via dialup cuz no store outside of Japan, neither online nor brick mortar, even sold them.

      and bragging about it on AIM!

    • unitedwithme@lemmy.today
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      2 days ago

      OP says ~2007 internet (asumming bandwidth and avail content) got good enough to become mainstem, not that I started around then.

      • Not a newt@piefed.ca
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        1 day ago

        It wasn’t that though. High speed internet was available before that time. What really affected things in 2006 was that peer exchange was introduced to bittorrent, giving it a massive advantage over other file sharing services at the time.