this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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I'm guessing you are extremely young as that is not how digital purchases have historically worked. The concept of "you bought a license to use it" hasn't been around long. Before that, you would be given an access code to go to a publisher's website like Disney and download a copy of the content you purchased. It wasn't tied to any licensing server or authentication system past that point, you just had a digital copy of your purchase.
I think legally, rights holders have always been asshats. I remember something called a V-C-R and when media was on magnetic tapes... even back then, there were warnings at the beginning of films. That was back before there were stream content and you had to physical drive or walk to buildings that contained the videos and pay for a rental... and a lot of poeple would make their own copies.
I think the big things that have changed is:
That said, I hate big companies and even if it is morally untenable, I will still continue to pirate, bc fuck em. If I could download a car or a barrel of whiskey, I'd pirate those too. maybe someday we'll get star trek-style replicators and i can finally download a car.
Yeah, I remember the days of renting VCR players and acting like we didn't already own one so we could play on one and record off the other. I think a lot of this is due to the rise in Internet infrastructure. 15 years ago streaming services wouldn't have been doable. There was no licensing, just files to download. You'd even get Digital Download codes in your DVD case when buying a movie, so you had multiple copies. Really sad how things are consolidating.
I think some kind of licensing was tehcnicall there, it was just easy to ignore back then bc they weren't pushing it in our faces every second (like i remember warnings on beginning of movies even before 2000s). I kinda remember one of my friends getting music off amzaon a long time ago but for stuff like that i assume it was just a EULA that they could click once and be done with (no clue how it works present day). Maybe it depends on exactly what we're talking about, but just saying I'm confident that greedy bastards would have some kind of legal something tied to it, even in 2000s before you could download. I just don't care - don't let em know you real info and fuck em 😀
I'm not "extremely young", in fact I'm likely older than you. That is always how digital purchases have worked.