Hi I'm currently try to learn more about the history of piracy. I know that at some point I saved a very cool plain HTML website regarding that topic that was recommended here but I lost it :/ So now I hope you have cool sources. I'm only into the piracy since a couple of years so everything will be helpful.

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[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 6 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

No idea what books to recommend, but the concept of piracy is very old. That translated to the realm of home computers, pretty much when home computers were invented and software licensing became a thing. People would share floppy disks and cassettes. And then stuff got easier with modems and the internet.

[–] D_C@sh.itjust.works 8 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (3 children)

I'm so old that I used to use what we would call 'copied games' on cassettes in the early 80s.

It was so accepted that kids from rival schools would (temporarily) forget that shit just to trade copied games. It would be decades later that I would hear it called pirated software.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 5 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Nice. I guess that's about when I was born, so I only remember copying 3½-inch floppy disks for friends. And it was music on my cassettes. 😉 But I don't remember it being called piracy either. We had a lot of games, though. Monkey Island 2 and a nice collection of DOS games. None of them were bought in a store. And I remember struggling with the English language, some games were off the table since I didn't learn English until middle school.

I guess copying things lost some of the social aspect after that. We shared a lot of stuff in digital form after CD writers became affordable in the mid- to late 90s. But these days you'd sit alone in front of the computer and just download whatever. And pretty much everything is available. Or just connect a phone to the car and have arbitrary things to listen to. Instead of a fixed set of 3 pre-made casettes for the entire summer vacation road trip.

[–] slice@feddit.org 4 points 14 hours ago

Thats such a good story.

[–] Zagam@piefed.social 2 points 12 hours ago

Ha, yeah. And later when we figured out how to double the size of 5.25 floppies with a hole punch.