this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2026
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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It was also called piracy back then too. It was incredibly common on the Commodore 64 starting in the 80s . They'd often call themselves crackers, because you needed to crack the piracy protection to be able to copy disks.
Those disks and even cassettes would then be shared from person to person or sold in shops or on second hand markets. AFAIK this is also when 1337/leet became popularised, to avoid censorship on BBSes, where file sharing was also possible.
For example, a magazine from 1991:
Note the group is called Elite productions and they call themselves pirates. There's also mention of crackers, specific events, and I especially enjoy that a piracy/cracking group felt it necessary to add a copyright logo next to the name of their piracy group which was called Elite Productions.
Surprised that didn't 1337 the name. 🤣
Notably, sometime in the 90's or early 00s they made a law that made if a federal crime to break any sort of encryption on an electronic or data storage or whatever, at the behest of CD manufacturers.
Seems more likely to be content corps, not hardware manufacturers, that would benefit most from that bullshit "law".
The difference comes out in the wash, though. They might as well have colored themselves red or blue (ahem), to help the cattle know what corpo team they prefer
—despite both colors having been painted onto the same greedy, amoral, and unchecked corpse golem.