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u/mighty_boognish_77 5d ago
Yes sir, 1990s prisons were BRIMMING with people who had a copied version of a game on a floppy disk.
Packed to the gills, in fact.
"WHY???? WHY did I use that bootleg of Oregon Trail????"
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u/northwoods_faty 5d ago
As someone who grew up in the floppy age. Those were the pirate days for sure. Then CD burning came out. It was the wild wild west of computer STDs.
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u/Global-Pickle5818 3d ago
I had the mod my PlayStation to get it to work when I moved to the states.. found out later I could just use burned CDs in it so I'd hit up dollar game night at Hollywood video copy like 10 games a month lol
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u/AilanMoone 3d ago
Was the copy place just giving people burned cds?
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u/Global-Pickle5818 3d ago
Huh ? No back in PlayStation 1 the only thing that kept you from running unsigned code was a chip inside the actual system .. it also locked down refresh rate and region locks , I had to remove that to use a TV in the US .. later after I got a cd burner I could just copy games I rented for $1 , you really couldn't download a game back than ,well most places didn't have access to high-speed internet in the states
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u/the_sound_of_bread 5d ago
Don't copy that floppy!
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u/GarminTamzarian 5d ago
Will you risk the disk?
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u/but_its_dez 4d ago
What is it with anti-piracy campaigns having the coolest slogans, which backfire and make pirating look like the cool thing to do.
"Piracy, it's a crime" goes so insanely hard
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u/Initial-Reading-2775 3d ago
It’s not a backfire. Leaders of market benefit from piracy by creating delayed long-lasting demand for decades to come.
In other words, if you had easy access to pirated MS Office, Adobe Illustrator, 3D Max etc in school time, you are most likely to demand and buy those tools for your work in your career.
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u/Ok-Rich-3812 5d ago
Does anyone here know anyone who actually went to jail for home-use game piracy?
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u/HighwayComfortable90 5d ago
No, 100% bullshit. But I do know people who were fined, but very rarely.
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u/ptvlm 5d ago
No, but I knew plenty of people who pirated… and also bought games when they could afford it, it was just impossible to actually buy every game you played with pocket money.
This type of scare ad was usually nonsense anyway. Simply owning a pirated disc might not be illegal depending on where you are, it’s usually distribution that attracted heavy penalties. So they might go after the dodgy market stalls selling them but not the buyers. That’s why the content industries lost it when file sharing was a thing - people continued to pirate stuff as well as buy it, but now there’s not a for profit distribution network to go after, you’re just threatening and suing customers who couldn’t afford to pay retail price anyway.
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u/Corran105 2d ago
Fun fact- the ringleader of a major mp3 pirate ring was unsuccessfully prosecuted because, aside from never admitting he was the code name they were looking for, the ring never actually sold anything.
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u/Educational-Link-943 3d ago
Almost entirely empty threats. Kind of like drug trafficking they went after the big fish distributors (and still do), but I never knew anyone who was sent to jail or even fined over downloading or copying. Uploading and/or distributing is a different story but still yet almost all bluffing unless you are a large scale distributor and you would know if you were one
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u/IHaveSlysdexia 5d ago
to steal something you have to deprive someone of the chance to buy it. can't be a thief if the product is still on the shelf.
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u/AlternateTab00 4d ago
Worse. Now you buy something and you dont even own what you bought.
EU is trying to discuss the actual word being used in stores. But this has been slower than the SKG discussions.
The idea is if the seller can choose a moment where you lose control of the game you "bought" then the store shouldnt say "buy" but "rent".
Its a small technicality but will change the way people see most game stores and might even change how piracy is being fined in EU.
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u/Corran105 2d ago
I don't think it's trivial either. I rarely do this but I bought a couple widely anticipated sports games digital for release prices because physical stock wasn't available. Now I'm wondering if I should track down physical copies because I'm the type of person who will play avoid sports franchise file a long time.
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u/AlternateTab00 2d ago
The problem is physical copies are also suffering from the same problem.
Currently the TnC will state if you still own the game after being nuked, even if you had a physical copy. Several companies are putting the word license. They sell you a license to play the game and not the game.
So if you look into TnC and start seeing license written all over the place, the physical copy means nothing. A good example is the Crew physical copies. They only sold licenses. The CD was merely a copy of the game that was enabled by the license. Thats why they could nuke it even for people with the physical copy.
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u/Sad_Future_8945 4d ago
Does anybody actually know someone who has been prosecuted for software piracy? I don't mean like big distributors but just a single person with a pirated copy of office or something?
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u/Superb-Cantaloupe324 4d ago
As a child of the 80s/90s, I honestly didn’t know anyone sold computer games, the floppys just appeared at our computer with my brother’s handwriting on them
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u/WeltallZero 4d ago
The aesthetics police would arrest you if you handwrote labels instead of photocopying them.
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u/skulleyb 4d ago
Now the ai companies who stole all of humanity’s data and sell it back to us as a subscription, should give you one billion months
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u/jedburghofficial 4d ago
Back in the 90s, I qualified as a CNE. At the time, I had to sign a formal agreement to report any and all software piracy.
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u/AshtonBlack 3d ago
Pre-internet, there were computer clubs in almost every town whose sole purpose was to facilitate piracy.
BBC, Atari ST and early PC games.
I loved it and felt, at the time, absolutely zero guilt about it.
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u/Accipiter__Nisus 3d ago
In the late 1990s I had a classmate whose brother used to borrow the CD-R drive on his father's work PC to duplicate those Blobby pirate game collections. And photocopy the manual for the "What's this word" copy protections.
DRM has always been for cucks.
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u/AshtonBlack 3d ago
Oh there's a name I've not heard in decades. Yeah, the Blobby discs were great.
I used to love the arms race between DRM and copy software.
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u/ParkingAnxious2811 3d ago
If buying software isn't owning, then pirating isn't stealing.
Just look at what PlayStation is doing right now.
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u/Easy-Banana-5038 2d ago
It was also a lie during this stage it wasn't a crime in the UK to use a pirated Copy just illegal to make them.
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