Gen X here. When I was a kid, I knew a couple who had two bookshelves full of copied VHS tapes. They had a double decker and would rent and copy.

Blank tapes weren’t free, so they still had spent a few hundred dollars or more on their collection.

Psst, torrenting was invented in 2001. Back in the old days of which you speak it was entirely sneakernet (sometimes you’d rent the mail’s sneakers).

“Torrents” doesn’t mean “piracy,” it means the bittorrent p2p protocol specifically. If you download something today off Usenet it’s not torrenting.

Of course I know them. It was me.

I had a stereo with the double vcr setup. I’d rent movies and copy my favorites.

Back then you wouldn’t necessarily sneak anything in, you’d bribe the projectionist (cash, ass, or grass) to set up in the booth and line-in the audio feed with a splitter. Then you’d sell it to the guy at the flea market who would make copies and sell for the low.

My cousin recorded roughly 8h of The Three Stooges using a VCR.

Yes. Is it too late to report it?

Fun story: I was in my teens and my aunts came to visit from abroad. They had gone to the local video store and asked the clerk to give them something for their nephews. The clerk asked a few questions about my brothers and me, and told my aunts to come back the next day.

They came to visit and proudly handed us the video tape. We put it into the machine and it played and incredibly horribly terrible sci-fi. It was so B-movie quality, the laser rays zapped off in a totally different direction than the guns were pointing.

Aunts leave a few days later, disappointed that the movie was so bad. A week later, my mother says, the tape was bidirectional (Video 2000, the German standard of the time), we should see if there was something on the other side. We put it back in and, lo and behold, there was a movie.

It started odd. A mansion, a lady entering an expensive car. She hands her little Maltese on a leash to the butler and drives off. As soon as she’s gone, the butler kicks the dog into the giant fountain in front of the mansion and goes inside. There, he and the maids get naked and into bed.

At this point, even 15-year-old me knows what’s going on, and the entire family starts staring at my mother, who started the whole thing. She was intently looking at the screen, saying things like, “Oh, it must be so relaxing when your boss is gone and you can just rest in bed!” or “Well, staff in this mansion, they are really friendly with each other!”

Then there was silence. Then she said, “Turn off this filth!”

And we never spoke of that Sunday afternoon again.

I remember we used to rent from the video store and record to Betamax like the old tape to tape days.

Wowza. “Torrent” being synonymous with “warez” was not on my 2026 bingo card.

Ddit: maybe just “copy” was the word it was replacing? Unexpected either way IMO.

My girlfriend’s dad had hundreds of movies on VHS, pirated from cassettes he’d rented in the past and copied at home by chaining two VCRs together over coaxial cable.

Software was wild pre-internet. My buddy had Windows 95 on 42 3¼" floppies that we copied onto additional sets of 42 floppies that we kept in heavy boxes and then painstakingly installed onto computers belonging to friends and family around the neighbourhood.

I also had a whole bunch of audio cassettes that contained music I dubbed from radio, other cassettes, and later CDs (burning your own was at first, impossible, and later, expensive).

I’m 46.

My parents “pirated” all the time when I was a kid. We’d generally have no more than basic cable (usually just antenna). There would be free weekends for HBO, Cinemax, or Showtime back when there was only one of each. My parents always had blank 8hr VHS cassettes and they’d record three movies to each. They recorded on SLP or EP mode (depending on the VCR model) to get that much time per cassette and it would end up with the crappiest quality ever. If you think VHS is shit quality, watch a movie on EP mode. Our movie collection was pretty extensive, but 90% of it was this.

You’d have to remember to reset the counter when putting in the tape and fast forward to a specific counter time written on the cassette in order to see the movie you want. My favorites were always second or third.

I vaguely remember talk of Dad climbing the pole to connect the cable himself but that went away when cable boxes became a requirement. There was also a time when he ran a coax from the neighbor’s apartment and we split the bill. That didn’t last long though because that neighbor moved.

My parents were sailing the seven seas back when your only option was a row boat.

Recording music from the radio (or video from tv) at home was not and is not piracy/illegal. In fact it is part of your rights when you buy a blank cassette.

To this day almost all countries recognize this right to home recording. As long as you aren’t acting to circumvent a copy protectionion system you are good to go.

I had some friends who would go on holiday and come back with VHS tapes with badly photocopied covers. The films were really bad quality as well. I was too young to understand what piracy was so I just thought that really bad videos were normal in the country to which they were going.

This was a thing until well into the 2000s. VHS stayed around for a long time. We only got our first DVD player in 2003 (it was dirt-cheap - a tiny silver thing the size of a PSOne that cost maybe €35, a small fraction of the price we paid for our VCR in the '90s) and you could still get many of the latest movies on VHS at that point, both legally and illegally. There were regional differences though. From what I’ve heard, my country of Germany held onto this medium for longer than others.

Most piracy (in my experience at least) involved recording TV broadcasts and then duplicating it for friends and family or duplicating content that was otherwise available within your circle. Some people recorded DVDs onto VHS (there were even devices that had both disc and tape drive that did this very conveniently), but this wasn’t that common.

Slightly off-topic, but I had a neighbor who was very proud of being able to circumvent the copy protection and compress movies on DVD to fit onto a single CD (which would still play on a DVD player) at an acceptable level of quality that was somewhere between VHS and DVD (but closer to the latter with the right codec settings). I taught myself how to do this later on as well, although only in order to share movies and shows with others, since I quickly preferred having media on hard drives and USB drives instead of juggling discs around. My personal go-to method was to rent DVDs from the local library for free and then create backups of those I wanted to enjoy more than once. I did the same with PC games and software from that place…

Didn’t have it for ET but for Disney movies that weren’t published on VHS at all because in my region they just kept rereleasing Snowwhite and Jungle Book in theaters periodically.

I’ve recorded songs off the radio too. I have copied VHSs as well later in life when a buddy had to bring over their recorder so we could hook them up to each other.

And the first music torrent was in maybe 7th grade and up. Somebody would get a new CD for their birthday or xmas and after a couple of weeks of exclusive listening Guns’n’Roses or Metallica would go from friend to friend where everybody got themselves a copy on cassette tape. There would be strategic planning like you get Michael Jackson (we didn’t know back then) and you get U2 or whatever around December.