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Valve's DRM was inspired by an exec's nephew, who 'used a $500 check I'd sent him for school expenses and bought himself a CD-ROM replicator… he sent me a lovely thank you note' (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/24356878

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[–] 51 points 2 years ago* (10 children)

I made so much money in high school downloading MP3s or anime from Napster/Kazaa/Limewire and burning then to CD/DVD since I was, like, the only kid in town with a computer, access to the internet, and a DVD burner. I remember getting asked how my parents let me get away with it and I was like "my dad is the one who taught me how to do it!" He was always borrowing games or music from co-workers. He got the DVD burner to make copies, since DRM was basically non-existent at the time for a majority of games. S'how we had Quake!

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago

    Same. We even had a music store in the UK, called Music Zone, this place would let you buy a CD and if you didn’t like it you could return it and get a refund and then rinse and repeat.

    As for parents. Mine had no clue what I was doing on the computer, but even when they learned due to all the people coming to the door, they were pretty chill.

    It got bad when our ISP would charge us for excessive downloads.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    If you don't mind me asking, were you on dial up, DSL, or coax?

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago* (5 children)

    IIRC, we first got DSL when I was just leaving junior high. Or maybe when I was a sophomore. I really don't remember when, but when I was doing most of this downloading, it was on DSL. When we still had dialup, I couldn't even reliably play UO all weekend (first-world problems, AMR?), because we only had 1 phone line and someone would eventually need the phone.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Yeah, downloading on 56k was not fun. My average per song was 1 hour, which I thought was decent considering it was free. My house got an additional line just for internet.

    We eventually got a coax modem, I was at high school at the time when we went high speed too. I felt like I was in the future. Lol.

    What I missed was losing access to AOL sites though but now that I look back, those were kinda trash.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Oof. I'm guessing your modem wasn't actually connecting at 56k then. Or anywhere near it. I was able to get a 3-5 megabyte mp3 in about 12-20 mins max using my dial up service. This is using Napster.

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