Piracy then and now...

When I was in high school, in the mid 90's... piracy was this hush-hush thing that was kept a secret because people were afraid of the consequences. I remember going over to the house of a big pirate, and he had an entire dresser filled with CD's. I expressed an interest in seeing what he had, and he flat-out refused to show me... for fear that I was someone that could jeopardize his operation. The only way you could get what you wanted was to hit the #warez IRC channels and schmooze with the mods to let you have some sort of access to their stuff. And it was only ever accessible via an FTP address, and there was never a domain associated with it. But they'd never just let you right in, and they'd always be suspicious of everyone... nobody wanted to get caught doing this sort of thing. Everyone knew damn well what the consequences could be. Nobody was backing it up as some sort of "legit" thing. Everyone was treading very carefully, and never being brazen about it. We knew damn well we didn't have the right to be doing what we did.

So I'm wondering... when did it go from being this super-secret seedy underground thing that happened in the dark corners of the internet, to being this "out and proud" thing that a lot of people now think is an exercise of freedom of speech? The whole "in your face" attitude and commercialization, and creation of the "piracy industry" is quite a change from the way it used to be.

These aren't the pirates that I used to know... that's for sure.