sidenote, are memes allowed? it doesn't say anything about them not being allowed, but I don't see anybody posting any π€·ββοΈ
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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I don't know if this meme is fully ironic, but kind of strange to think "torrenting" is considered the OG piracy method now.
For me personally, the OG pirating was buying bootleg VHSs/CDs/DVDs. But torrenting/P2P was the first mass scale digital piracy method.
IRC? Napster? Edonkey? Emule? Kademlia?
And, hell, before that there was that guy in class who for five bucks would burn you a CD with any game you wanted, which he probably got off usenet...
And of course for music there was the old double deck cassette copier...
(Personally the first software crack I remember was dismantling Monkey Island's βdial a pirateβ wheel so I could photocopy it to share with friends after copying the diskettes...)
I remember those copy protections. Go to page 6, line 42, word 3
Damn, I miss when games came with manuals... the anticipation when reading them while coming back home from the store...
Test Drive 3 had a pretty complicated wheel.
Your list is compromised primarily of P2P networks and a DHT?
Older methods still best methods.
Yeah, I imagine to younger folks it feels like what usenet felt like to me when I was their age. Mystical land of unknown loot, if you know how to get there
It's old but it's not even close to the OG. I believe the OG is newsgroups, and after that was p2p file sharing apps like limewire and napster, and only then did torrenting become a big thing
Those were the times when my ISP, which was owned 100% by the city, had it's own newsgroups server full of warez lol
I'm gonna ignore non internet based methods. Here is the evolution imo
Edit: I'm seeing IRC a lot, not sure where it fits in this list. Assume it's around no 2.
This is the correct list, having lived through it. BBS services in the mid-1980s were the start of Razor1911, Paradox and other distro and cracker groups. I'd edit 2 to include FTP which is what BBS evolved into with secret dropsites for new releases.
IRC is 2.5 on this list. You can group that alongside the pre-web internet services, like AOL which had slightly IRC-like chat rooms dedicated to serving warez and videos in the same way (requesting a list from a chatbot, and then requesting sequential files).
Some light history here, though like all warez-related scholarship, there's a ton missing that you had to have seen to know:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene
https://archive.org/details/b904a8eb-9c98-4bb1-bf25-3cb9d075b157/
Great list! And according to your list I'm right. BBSes aren't internet, and usenet is a synonym for newsgroups
Copying cassettes
Original method wasn't FTP?