The first known things pirated looks to have been software at some point in the 70’s.
Most music and video files were so large that actively sharing them back then wasn’t feasible for most people, though I’m sure many made it work even in those slow times. I remember the days of watching images load in one pixel layer at a time.
Napster was the first real breakout application specifically for getting pirated media, but people were definitely sharing movies, music, and anything else digital over IRC well before Napster popped into existence.
Porn. It’s always porn.
You’re actually kinda right. My understanding is the very first jpg image was an unlicensed scan of a playboy centerfold (cropped to exclude the nudity). It was copied and redistributed all over the place, before the internet even existed and it wasn’t licensed, but was copyrighted.
In the early '80s, BBSes were a source of piracy. Also, local user groups would share or rent tapes/disks of software ‘only to be used that month,’ with a wink and a nod.
In the mid-'80s, I was downloading…images from FTP sites around the world, and also assembling multi-part uuencoded files from Usenet.
This was all before the web, and It wasn’t new then.
I was a teenager when Napster launched. I remember doing a lot of Metallica. And then even more Metallica when they complained about it. And then even MORE when the flash cartoons came out for “Napster bad. Money goooooood”
I don’t know exactly what it was first. It was music obviously…but I remember just spending hours downloading stuff, a lot of humor songs too like the kicked my dog, Donald duck blow job, sesamea street etc.
5 1/4 Inch floppy disk copying and sharing would have been one of the first widespread examples.
alt.binaries newsgroups were an early place to get pictures or software online.
1998 - downloaded hundreds of Super Nintendo, arcade and neo geo rooms to play on an emulator. Used my university’s fast internet connection and a Zip drive to download hundreds of files. A year later got my very own ISDN line then began downloading MP3s and grainy movies. Seeing how the entertainment industry has deteriorated over the years, I don’t feel so guilty these days.
I don’t have a source for this but I believe the first internet-pirated item was software, although “pirated” might not be the proper label for it… I vaguely recall an article where the “fathers” of the TCP protocol sent a new revision of some new tcp code across the globe to a 3rd party who did not own the rights to that code somewhere in the 1970s so world wide connections could be tested.
If this does not fit the piracy label then I would not be surprised if Tim Berners-Lee would have used/linked to some imagery or document he didn’t have rights for on his first build websites when testing “his” World Wide Web invention.
Not sure, I have a background in the scene, but the first thing I remember pirating is Temple of Apshai for my VIC-20, however, I did have a Sinclair before that so I should have pirated something for that too.
