1999 piracy mostly consisted of paying for a pirated copy that someone decided to make profit off; most likely, they weren't the person to make the (first!) copy, and they're not even sure what's on the thing they were selling you. It was mostly bootlegging.

[–] Confuzzeled@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

When I was a kid we still recorded stuff off the radio and copied our zx spectrum games on the family hi-fi. I'd say good times but it's so much better now I can pirate everything in great quality from teh interwebs.

[–] Selmafudd@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

My memory is a little fuzzy with dates but I'm pretty sure Napster was going full steam by '99 but even before that we used to trade mp3 files on mIRC or ICQ+CuteFTP, I had hundreds of albums I never paid for which I am still amazed I managed to do over a shared 56k connection

[–] Getawombatupya@aussie.zone 1 points 1 year ago

Like buying a game CD and a warez copy bypass and the crew doing an ASCII art walk through, bought for $5 from a classmate

Or shareware floppy disks with copyright bypass

[–] squiblet@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In the pre-Internet early 90s, CDs were $15-25 (with inflation, about $40 now)…. And for a lot of music, you had no way of hearing it first. Shoplifting was popular.

[–] SternburgExport@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

At least later on a lot of shops had these listening stations.

[–] kratoz29@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

For real... I never had this problem before... Currently I'm a proud Spotify user.