The original post: /r/piracy by /u/Live_Farm_7298 on 2025-01-23 11:26:19.
I just wanted to reminisce. Join in the conversation in the comments.
Tell me your favourite memory of piracy from this period! (2005-2015)
While I’m sure there will be some old school sceners who will argue that it was earlier…
But I believe 2007 to 2014 was the ‘golden age’ of online piracy.
Setting the scene for those too young to know - its 2007.
Since the early 2000s - Piracy was rampant - even people who had little to no interest in computers liked that they could get their music for free - fasttrack and gnutella networks like napster/limewire/bearshare/morpheus were common virus vectors on the family 'puter.
The Pirate bay seemed to be the public face of torrenting - Sharing is caring struck a cord - they seemed to enjoy taking the flack for a lot of other sites through their “no fucks given, this isn’t the US. Go away.” attitude.
The warez boards - Warez.bb in particular were a haven of direct links and had all sorts of crazy stuff.
Games, PDFs of books, music, software and tv/films.
But then as broadband became more commonplace, the rise of Streaming specific sites and forums Alluc, NinjaVideo, Icefilms, TvShack, Re1ease.net - streaming (to start with at least) in glorious DivX. with standards like 720p minimum, no cams and no ad
Many of these an off-shoot from another, internet egos wanted to prove they can do it better.
The best of these figuring out really cool ways to obfuscate public links from sites like Mega and rapidshare - embedding *just* the streaming link to the end user which meant links stayed live.
Branching out from desktop only - to XBMC and android apps.
Then operation ‘in our sites’ - which resulted in many of these big sites either being seized, changing domains, straight up bowing out… or raided - Sometimes a combination of all four. (shout out Phara who even got interviewed by the Newyork times after her stint in prison https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAPsLVt8t4Y ).
The piracy hydra remained - but the rise of netflix and the simplicity of access meant lots of people lost interest. Piracy became difficult for the uninitiated. Setting up VPNs to access sites or hosting a Plex server - meant for many the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.
And in/around 2015 I think many started to take the simpler routes - whatever they looked like to them.
Self hosting using plex/XBMX - relying on oneclick apps like popcorn time, or paying the tax and signing up to the streaming sites, because it was simple you pay for one or two accounts (which cost the same as premium mega/rapidshare membership and got access to your stuff.
And in less than 5 years they blew it. Greed meant that slowly people were returning to piracy.
Now fast forward ten years.
They took the piss. There is now a subscription for every company.
They gatekeep HD/4K. and they just decide to not keep some stuff online.
They can’t stop piracy.
You’ve got serverless & self-hosted streaming platforms.
Android TV apps. RealDebrid. Plex/Jellyfin. Sonarr/Radarr. Streamio.
What a time to be alive.
If we ever were truly ‘gone’… we are so back baby.