No Stupid Questions

The first known things pirated looks to have been software at some point in the 70's.

Most music and video files were so large that actively sharing them back then wasn't feasible for most people, though I'm sure many made it work even in those slow times. I remember the days of watching images load in one pixel layer at a time.

Napster was the first real breakout application specifically for getting pirated media, but people were definitely sharing movies, music, and anything else digital over IRC well before Napster popped into existence.

Porn. It's always porn.

In the early '80s, BBSes were a source of piracy. Also, local user groups would share or rent tapes/disks of software 'only to be used that month,' with a wink and a nod.

In the mid-'80s, I was downloading...images from FTP sites around the world, and also assembling multi-part uuencoded files from Usenet.

This was all before the web, and It wasn't new then.

I discovered emulators in the mid 90s so the first thing I pirated was Harvest Moon and Final Fantasy 3 for the SNES since they didn't ever carry these at stores near me to have ever bought them even if I had the money.

The first widely reported instsnce of software piracy was in 1975-1976 when a PC hobby group was distributing copies of newly founded Microsoft's Altair BASIC. Go figure Microslop would be the first software company to do legal battle against piracy. 😒

The first thing I downloaded at home was Star Wars Imperial march using a 56k modem. But before that a colleague of my father made a fair bit of money using his relatively fast internet connection to download games and apps from newsgroups, effectively running a subscription service offering 1 CD each with programs and games per month. I still have the Mp3, but the CDs are long gone.

I was a teenager when Napster launched. I remember doing a lot of Metallica. And then even more Metallica when they complained about it. And then even MORE when the flash cartoons came out for "Napster bad. Money goooooood"

I don't know exactly what it was first. It was music obviously...but I remember just spending hours downloading stuff, a lot of humor songs too like the kicked my dog, Donald duck blow job, sesamea street etc.

No idea, but Lenna is probably one of the earlier images pirated over the internet given its history in testing image compression algorithms.

Well, it happened in the age of the BBS and it was porn. I couldn't tell you the title.

we were grabbin apps in the usenet binaries by the mid-late 80s

5 1/4 Inch floppy disk copying and sharing would have been one of the first widespread examples.

alt.binaries newsgroups were an early place to get pictures or software online.

I remember pirated single by the Beatles in 1968

I don't have a source for this but I believe the first internet-pirated item was software, although "pirated" might not be the proper label for it... I vaguely recall an article where the "fathers" of the TCP protocol sent a new revision of some new tcp code across the globe to a 3rd party who did not own the rights to that code somewhere in the 1970s so world wide connections could be tested.

If this does not fit the piracy label then I would not be surprised if Tim Berners-Lee would have used/linked to some imagery or document he didn't have rights for on his first build websites when testing "his" World Wide Web invention.

1998 - downloaded hundreds of Super Nintendo, arcade and neo geo rooms to play on an emulator. Used my university’s fast internet connection and a Zip drive to download hundreds of files. A year later got my very own ISDN line then began downloading MP3s and grainy movies. Seeing how the entertainment industry has deteriorated over the years, I don’t feel so guilty these days.

Never a trust a Klingon.mp3