One of the local secondary schools had a mailserver. No one knew or took security seriously in the mid-to-late nineties. As a result, it also hosted an ftp-server with widely shared credentials that held some 20GB worth of mp3s when it was shut down after three years in service. It was one of the biggest in the country at the time.

Irc and DCC-transfers were huge, too. As CD-writers became common place, a lot of it took place over snail mail or sneakernet. A guy at school had printed lists of all his tunes and took orders to burn them to music CDs.

I think the limited selection and limited transfers/storage made you cherish things more. Today you'll never finish your library in your lifetime.

Ease of grabbing content. There are so many tools that make it too easy and automated. I mean this has changed drastically in the last 10 years let alone 90s.

One thing I truly miss from the Winamp days of piracy was the live feeds. Anime, porn, music, some great adventures discovered from just browsing. It's how I discovered Deftones, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Sindee Coxx.

Mp3 to cdda sounds like shit

Maybe 2010s but there was this program called Sopcast. It would stream live sports in HD through P2P and it worked amazingly! Don't know what happened to that but now it's just shitty sites filled with ads.

Having to wait a day or more to download something. Today you can download a movie in seconds.

This is mid 00s but I'd bring back Oink. And my ratio

The reason of pirating things because you would be offline has mostly disappeared. Partially because mobile data has become more affordable but also because more subscription based apps give you some way to consume content offline.

Where I see this the most is with music. Outside of those who want FLAC quality I don't know of a lot of people who pirate music anymore.

I'd bring back my favourite website from the time:

http://imaginers.com/iw

Started me on a career, with Macromedia's product line.

Honestly? I have no idea how to pirate now. That's the biggest change.

The simplicity of a lot of things, such as search engines giving you workable links, torrent pages didn't have 11 buttons that said download. Even malware was innocent and you could avoid getting into trouble by avoiding Linkin-park_Hybrid-theory.exe