The earliest documented instances of piracy are the exploits of the Sea Peoples who threatened the ships sailing in the Aegean and Mediterranean waters in the 14th century BC. ...
/s
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Thanks will keep that in mind when I next time sail in international waters /s
Stay away from the US and their sphere of influence and you‘ll be reasonable safe in international waters.
I hear Somalia also isn't the best place to sail by.
Currently I'm hearing EP 92: The Pirate Bay from the Darknet Diaries https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/92/
I have listened to every episode of that, hard recommend! 😀
Just downloaded it, will be listening to it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCAL_YgYiP0
There is a lot about the history of digital piracy in there. Its a Defcon talk by Jason Scott who calls himself an archivist and historian of technology. Really funny talk as well, generally recommended :)
Edit: Maybe you meant his project textfiles.com? There is a big section about piracy as well: http://textfiles.com/piracy/
Thaanks a lot. I will watch the talk. And also I didn't know about textfiles.com yet. It looks very interesting. I don't think it was the webiste that I remember but it looks very interesting nonetheless. I also found a book about the history of music piracy: Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century
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.
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.
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.
Thats such a good story.
Ha, yeah. And later when we figured out how to double the size of 5.25 floppies with a hole punch.
warez and IRC is where I started. There used to be IRC channels you could go to and get links to warez sites for stuff or simply share directly via IRC downloading. The people who were in college/university with T1 lines were the kings of that stuff at the time as everyone else was lucky if they were even on a 56k dial-up connection. I pretty much pirated almost every Dreamcast game via IRC OR via forums where people would burn stuff to a disc for you and then physically mail the discs to your house. I had a buddy that was in college half way across the country that would do this. download a bunch of stuff via his T1 line, burn the stuff to a bunch of CD-Rs and then mail them to my house, I remember that's how I got Windows 2000.
It started way before that.
People copying books and sheet music. If you're talking electronic, then I have "pirated" reel to reel music copied from records from the 60's.
If you're talking computers, I have floppy discs copied and passed around from the 80's.
BBS's existed in the 70's and were sharing stuff before IRC became popular.
Heck, if humans can technically make a copy of it, no matter how difficult, we will and freely share it.
This is the same concept as copying books... Even rewriting by hand without the approval of the author could be considered piracy.
Books were always about the content and never about the paper. Same goes for digital media.
Now I'm thinking about all of the books (particularly The Bible) ~~pirated~~ transcribed in monasteries during the Middle Ages.
I wonder how often books were actually stolen from ships by pirates.
There are still a few BBS around. Before that you could try sharing floppy discs on the schoolyard, that was how I started
I remember all of it if you have any questions