“Piracy” (in a sense of unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials) was a thing ever since copyright became a thing. Otherwise you wouldn’t need copyright to be a law.
Movie/video piracy existed since the 80s, before TPB there were bootleg DVDs, before then there was bootleg VHS. For music it goes back even further, reel-to-reel machines which could copy entire albums at good-enough quality existed back in the 1950s, and compact cassettes got good-enough for music in the 70s.
I remember watching so many movies that I had either taped off television or scraped from one VHS to another. I had a double feature of Krull and Logan’s Run. I watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit? anytime I wanted. The Empire Strikes Back had been briefly taped over with a few minutes of a Who’s the Boss episode, such that I never saw the scene where Luke hides in an animal carcass until those movies were rereleased in the… late 90s I think? I had cassette mix tapes with songs taken from radio or my dad’s record collection.
“Piracy” (in a sense of unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials) was a thing ever since copyright became a thing. Otherwise you wouldn’t need copyright to be a law.
Movie/video piracy existed since the 80s, before TPB there were bootleg DVDs, before then there was bootleg VHS. For music it goes back even further, reel-to-reel machines which could copy entire albums at good-enough quality existed back in the 1950s, and compact cassettes got good-enough for music in the 70s.
I remember watching so many movies that I had either taped off television or scraped from one VHS to another. I had a double feature of Krull and Logan’s Run. I watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit? anytime I wanted. The Empire Strikes Back had been briefly taped over with a few minutes of a Who’s the Boss episode, such that I never saw the scene where Luke hides in an animal carcass until those movies were rereleased in the… late 90s I think? I had cassette mix tapes with songs taken from radio or my dad’s record collection.