“Pirating” VHS used to be a family affair. We’d rent a movie on a friday night and record it onto a second VHS/VCR while watching it for the first time.

I used to pirate on vhs myself, i figured out how to do it as a kid. I was probably 10 when i started. You didn’t point a cam corder at the telly, you just piggybacked two VCRs, and recorded what you hired from the store, or taped from the telly show streaming from the antenna. Either paused at the adds or left it going. They actually appreciate people who used to record the telly shows, now, because back in the day they didn’t save anything, they recorded over all those old shows on their big film reels, so some of those old pirated tapes are the only record left. Victimless crime, either way, though.

a lot of people made copies of LPs and tapes, or recorded off the radio… and those often got passed around at school. someone having two VCRs to make copies of movies wasn’t nearly as common. we lived in small towns or out in the boonies, so there weren’t any ‘retailers’ selling bootlegs or copies either.

i do remember downloading a few of those old cam releases back in the stone age of the internets (slow dialup). super low res and quality, often unstable video and/or audience noises. but hey, it was ‘good enuf’.

…we bought our first VHS recorder in the late seventies, when very few films were released on videocassette and the MSRP for commercial films was around $360 (inflation-adusted to 2026), so everyone’s libraries pretty much comprised bootlegs and television broadcast recordings…those old tape-trading networks (which my mother called the ‘black market’) promulgated notoriously-sketchy multi-generation copies by modern standards, but the novelty of watching hollywood films at home was so profound that nobody gave much consideration to recording artifacts compromising the video quality…

…that huge expense for commercial releases essentially built the video-rental market in the early eighties (despite hollywood’s repeated attempts to quash it) and it wasn’t until the advent of ‘priced to own’ films in the late eighties (around $50 inflation-adjusted) that people began collecting legitimate commercial releases for their home libraries, creating a huge new market which transformed the film industry as profoundly as did cable television fifteen years earlier and streaming fifteen years later…

Late '80s. We would coordinate who would buy which cassette album and then go to the person’s house with the best “dub” deck and make copies. There was 2x and maybe even 4x copy speed but the quality would suffer. Usually good enough for our shitty car stereos though. 90 minute tapes could normally get an album on each side. IIRC the high quality blanks were about $1.50 each if you bought a 10 pack. $8 for a tape of a regular band or something older like Led Zeppelin, $12 for a brand new hit album.

Making mix tapes for your crush was HUGE at the time. Hey, if I can’t write poetry at least I can make her a cassette of love songs, right?

The most common I remember (I was like 5 at the time) was to go to the video rental store and rent a bunch of movies on VHS. You’d also rent a VHS player. You take the rental VHS player home and cable it to your existing VHS player. While one is playing the movie, the other is recording. Quick way to get a massive library of movies all named with sharpie markers and those little VHS stickers.

The real question is how many times you write over that movie and have to cross out what it was because you obviously can’t be bothered to go and buy more VHS tapes.

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.

My experience is more late 80s, early 90s as a kid/teen. We recorded tons of stuff on VHS from cable TV and shared with friends and it was extremely common. It’s similar to how people use DVRs only you end up with a more portable copy if you want to share it. DVRs took away that sharing capability on purpose to increase cable and streaming revenue. Sure VHS was lower quality, but at that time cable wasn’t great either and HD TV’s and content weren’t common. Cams from movie theaters just wasn’t realistic and theater was still about the experience way more than it is now with everything just extra loud and flashy if you go to one.

I also copied stuff on cassette to share or to make it more portable since I had a cassette walkman. Sometimes that was from radio, but that was harder since you didn’t have a guide to what was coming up. Either you had to sit there and hope a song played that you wanted and then rewind if it wasn’t one. Or you had to copy from one cassette to another and further lose quality with analog copying. More common was making mix tapes either from original purchase cassettes or CDs once I had a CD player. Then BMG and copycats came along and everyone cheated the free trials to get a ton of free music before torrenting came along later.

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.

Yes. I don’t remember all that well, as I was ~8yo.
Was visiting NYC with my family, and we passed a guy selling bootleg VHS movies from a table on the street. It was an actual thing

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.