Even ignoring P2P predecessors to torrenting like Kazaa or Napster, there was still piracy early on. I guess it counts as piracy adjacent, but I got started buying bootleg anime boxsets off ebay, because the actual boxsets were like $200/season, and minimum wage was under $7/hour when I started, but I could get the same season on three DVDs from Hong Kong for $30. It wasn’t too long after that, I found out about fansubs and started spending far too much time on IRC, downloading anime, manga and music off XDCC bots. I wasn’t allowed to use bittorrent on the family machine, because “That’s like Kazaa, we’ll get sued into ruin,” but those bots in fansub group channels were fine, especially since it wasn’t immediately apparent looking at mIRC that I had one running too.
My first piracy was trading dubbed (as in copied vhs tapes) anime tapes in the 90s because that was literally the only way to get it in small town america unless it was something huge like akira. Although the releases often were dubbed. Kids today don’t know how good they have it with arguing subbed vs dubbed. In the 90s you got what you got and that’s how you watched sailor moon
Even ignoring P2P predecessors to torrenting like Kazaa or Napster, there was still piracy early on. I guess it counts as piracy adjacent, but I got started buying bootleg anime boxsets off ebay, because the actual boxsets were like $200/season, and minimum wage was under $7/hour when I started, but I could get the same season on three DVDs from Hong Kong for $30. It wasn’t too long after that, I found out about fansubs and started spending far too much time on IRC, downloading anime, manga and music off XDCC bots. I wasn’t allowed to use bittorrent on the family machine, because “That’s like Kazaa, we’ll get sued into ruin,” but those bots in fansub group channels were fine, especially since it wasn’t immediately apparent looking at mIRC that I had one running too.
It’s currently at $7.25 so think about how much you could afford now!
My first piracy was trading dubbed (as in copied vhs tapes) anime tapes in the 90s because that was literally the only way to get it in small town america unless it was something huge like akira. Although the releases often were dubbed. Kids today don’t know how good they have it with arguing subbed vs dubbed. In the 90s you got what you got and that’s how you watched sailor moon