Everyone just copied everything from each other. Floppy, then Twilight CDs. Then came the internet and exploring music there was better than sitting around waiting for a song to come on the radio to quickly press record. It was normal when I was young to share, not really an active choice.

Probably being unable to buy music when I was in my teens.

No job, no income, no way to get to the store anyway, and to top it off… half the music I liked I wouldn’t have been able to find anyways. (Fan songs/parodies)

So I learned that (free) YouTube downloaders and MP3 converters existed.

A bit later than that… NES/SNES games I wanted to play but those consoles were before my time. So I learned emulators existed.

So basically stuff I didn’t have access to otherwise.

I lived in china and it was the only way to access loads of media. When I got back I saw the hellscape that streaming had become. We recreated cable. That and not owning anything anymore. So I still sail the high seas. Even if I wanted to pay the high price of 30 different streaming services it's a better more enjoyable experience sailing.

My dads friend used to burn random movies to DVD and give them to us. Eventually, he showed my dad where to get them and my dad showed me. I think it was the uploader axxo on isohunt that my dad would always download from. I nearly completely forgot about that, thanks for making me think about it! We really had no idea what we were doing, we used to use utorrent and everything. That family computer was riddled with viruses. It took us about an hour to remove some random extensions that changed our default search engine one time

I started years ago when cable was on top to get away from ads, I stopped for a few years but since ads have been making a comeback I started back up, screw ads

Having no money and deciding that shouldn't stand between me and media I wouldn't pay for anyway. Also my local college's DC++ network, where someone had about 20 TB back in 2006 (which was a bit of a culture shock after having been banned from watching most TV during childhood).

Wanted to play some games, didn't have money but I did know someone that knew someone that knew someone that ran a BBS that had some pirated games.

Yes, I'm that old.

I started downloading music, because it was free.

Over the years I've found many more excuses to justify it though.
P.s. Down with big corpo etc. etc.

Intellectual property is the lamest form of property put forth by the propertarians.

Basically as soon as I found out about it. I really got into it when I later discovered emulation. Never felt bad about it; I was pretty much only looking for games I literally could not buy because they could only be had via retailers, and they didn't always carry every title.

Hmm, this is an interesting question, as I live in a 3rd world country it is hard to pinpoint exactly which event drove me to this beautiful world.

With that said, the first console that we ever had (sis and I) was a PS1, it came with Gran Turismo and DBZ Ultimate Battle 22, I think.

Anyway, I was probably 6 years old, and my dad took care of chip it (took it to a place, it is common to do that in Mexico) and then I got the pirated games for dirt cheap in flea markets and such, a similar event happened with the PS2.

But when I truly sailed the seas for myself, at least in a gaming scenario, happened when I got my Nintendo DS phat, I quickly knew about a R4, and managed myself to find ROM sites, homebrew, heck I used to use Windows Live Messenger in that little thing lol (DS Lite at that time).

I mean, I pirated software for PC and possibly burned some games for the PS1/PS2 before having the DS, but having unlimited portable fun with the DS (and then the PSP) was when I turned into a no return point.

Most of the stuff I was looking for couldn't even be found on store shelves. Before online shopping and streaming, if it wasn't the latest release or biggest hit, you probably wouldn't be able to find it locally. You'd waste time browsing up and down aisles of junk only to leave disappointed, then try again at another store, hoping that by some miracle they'd have it.

Then I discovered that terabytes upon terabytes of content was available, nearly instantly and conveniently, on the internet. All you had to do was click a few buttons and you had what you wanted. That was about 25+ years ago, and the recording industry still has not adapted to offer a service that even comes close to what was available back then.

Was born into it really. Got my first PC. Knew nothing. Slowly learnt stuff off my sis who was going into engineering. Thru her I met a guy who was dating a friend of ours. He was like hey sign up for this BB and you can get tons of free shit. He pointed to D2 which I played like mad. I signed up and just got thrown into the scene. Ended up being an admin of that board for a bit. This was around the time Oink was at its peak. Like 2y later, gone.

Went to uni myself and just supplied everyone with free stuff for school. Even profs lol.

And that’s just how I stayed. Felt good buying everything I used after I got a job out of school tho. Still use some of it today! But for most media, it’s just like why NOT sail. If movies were a buck a pop like they should be, I’d probably furl up my Jolly Roger. Till that day tho 🏴‍☠️

My brothers were using limewire like 20 years ago when I was a preteen. So I started using limewire, and quickly surpassed them in skill. Jumped to TPB when they got popular. I now host the family media server, and take requests 😬

Still haven't taken the time to set up sonarr radarr and the like. Would probably simplify my life a lot. But I've got a system and it works 🤷‍♂️

VB 6. We were learning it in school and I wanted to learn on my own as well. Spent a lot of time on IRC after that.

wir hatten ja nichts

I was a teenager who wanted to be a 1337 haxxor so I found out what warez were, and then wanted to play a bunch of games for free.

Being a poor elementary school kid who wanted to play the trendy singleplayer games.

Availability, since I was a kid till today, most things are not available in my country. Convenience is a bonus. Price is a negative because my usenet/indexer cost is more than netflix/prime/disney and 2 more local services of my country.

When I was learning programming, free software for schools wasn't (officially) a thing yet.

Lots of folks pointedly looked the other way so I could have a home copy of the development environment I was learning.

I think the first thing I ever pirated was Cars. I was like 13, They didn't have a VHS for it at the library and our home internet at the time was too slow to even think about streaming, so I figured out how to torrent and it took like 6 days to get a complete copy of the movie.

I ended up sticking to pirating and pack packratting all the movie files locally specifically because our internet was so bad.

Ssi randomly stopped paying me

I found a website that showed my how to use RSS feeds to automatically download TV shows. Having my favorite shows download automatically overnight was very convenient. There was no streaming services for TV shows back then and even if there was, my internet was way too slow for that. I had a portable media player with a massive 80GB hard drive that I could load my pirated TV shows and ripped DVDs on when I was away from home.

Originally, it was being a child and not having any money of my own, and my mom getting out her wallet to enter card information on a website she had no previous knowledge of, for something she would never use personally, was a whole... thing that I can probably count on my hands the number of times it actually happened. So I stopped even asking and figured it out myself.

Edit: also, we had netflix but sometimes the shows I wanted to keep up with were still airing and I couldn't wait.

Now, I just don't think any company that would take my money in exchange for, generally temporary, access to media/software really deserves or needs my money all that much, and especially not more than I do. I also strongly resent that there is not a public and legal domain for things that are older than like 5 or 10 years and not actively being worked on.

When I discovered soulseek and could stop paying $20-$30 per CD. Incidentally, I bought an iPod round the same time and couldn't copy my mp3s over, and that's the last time i ever bought an apple product

I wanted to buy music, but a CD that I got in the 00's had some "protection" so that I couldn't rip it and listen to it on my MP3 player.

Now, I ripped it from a Linux computer and had no problems, but was so upset that the record companies tried this. I realized that it's not about right or wrong, but just about power and money.

Holy shit I also pirated DC talk hahaha. Wasn't allowed to listen to it .

What would people think of they hear that I'm sailing the high seas?

I'm very fond of DC Talk's So Long My Friend.

To answer your question, it was probably music that sent me sailing the high seas. The only way to get music back then was to tape songs off the radio, download them online or buy a bootleg CD off the street.

Otherwise you'd have a spend a tonne at the few music shops we have/had.

Exclusive sports deals, geo-blocking, and the general greed of streaming companies that just keep increasing their prices while you don't actually own anything.

As a child my parents didn't want to give me their credit card (like fair enough), but so I had to find other ways.

Then payed for netflix for a while and was pretty happy with it. Since you have to have like 13 streamubg services of which only about half are available on my country I found Plex. Now I use Jellyfin and couldn't be happier.

Just born to break the rules.

When my mom's old laptop became mine in around 2011 it wasn't even powerful enough to run Minecraft at more than 13 FPS, so I sure as shit wasn't gonna spend the occasional money I got on a steam card at 7/11 to load up an account I couldn't even use to play the games well with

I think every game I've ever pirated from childhood and actually liked enough to finish has been paid for now though

Back then: The prices of shit and ease of procurement. Nowadays, I’ll buy reasonably priced software because I’m not a broke dick and like to have support if needed. Though, understandably, there’s still a lot of bullshit software that’s way too expensive. But I lean towards foss software when I can get away with it.

But for streaming/cable/satellite? I’d rather wipe my ass with that money. I’ll go to the theater if a movie looks good enough, just to change things up, but with so much awful shit being produced… nope.

I pay for music streaming on Deezer, but also have a carefully curated media library and run Nicotine 24/7 to share on slsk.

I guess it’s a toss up between money and principle. 🤷‍♂️

I made bootleg tapes for my friends. I remember Little Feat and The Band were pretty popular choices.