anti-piracy magazine ad from 1993

Arthur Besse@lemmy.ml to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 570 points –

don't copy that floppy!

59

For the record yes I would steal a car if the owners car didn't disappear

You mean make a copy of the car then.

Man I feel old. It was a reference to this anti-piracy ad:

I, for one, would download the shit outta a car.

I had a dream once that I could download a sandwich. I kept downloading different delicious sandwiches on Limewire until one of them gave me a virus.

That being said I would still definitely download a sandwich.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

I play Assetto Corsa. I have downloaded 300GB worth of cars, and I'll do it again.

Pretty sure they meant theft of the theoretical car that might have been sold to you if you could afford it.

/s

2 more...

Those are the worst excuses. "Don't do that thing or we will ruin your life" like. That isn't a reason not to do something, you are just monsters.

In my state we have signs that say "LITTER AND IT WILL HURT".

I loath littering but those signs always make me chuckle.

"When you use illegally copied software, you're committing...DOS and Macintosh"

Don't dead, open inside-type vibes

Back in the day when the only copyright protection was scare tactics. Anyway looks like an ad for a software product, not actually anti-piracy propaganda. Nostalgic none the less. There was a time when all software was obtained through floppies. I sure was glad to see those go, damn things failed more often than they worked. I kept a big box of blank ones and copied everything off three times in case the first two failed.

I still use floppies. They may be gone, but people still use them.

And I thought I was a holdout, didn't remove the floppy drives from my home built desktop computers until like 2005.

Government still uses them in sensitive situations "for security" (and not having to beg for funding only to risk the upgrade failing and taking down some secret, billion-dollar operation) too.

For what, if I may ask?

I have a floppy case that I keep my old PS 1+2 and GC memory cards in, but that’s about as much use as I’ve got for the whole thing at this point, so I’m super curious.

Lmao the notion that you would pay so much more for the fine than the software is worth.

"It's a real bargain when you consider what some people pay" is a great slogan for asteroid insurance

Something that can't be stolen is not property. You can only copy a stream of bits not steal. You can also replicate it to infinity. A pound of gold is real property. You can definitely steal it and you can't replicate it.

Maybe it's like Diamonds. You can absolutely make diamonds in a lab without any bloodshed and people will be like "the blood is what makes it special". Maybe the "original" bits make it special?

with that price tag, I'm surprised more people aren't copying that floppy.

"Buy my $80 course to learn how you can waste even more money!"

Paying $80 to ensure people paid for other things? This is silly.

Their attempts to pretend software copying is anything serious was as hilarious in '93 as it is today.

Ahh always nice to revisit my first dose of propaganda.

I would have downloaded a car if I could have.

I think companies just started outsourcing to contract workers who can't afford legitimate software, so that when they sue the guy for piracy, he's just poor. His life may be ruined by the suit, but the company is fine.

Edit: Fixed sentence cohesion

The ad makes more sense if you actually read it. They're talking about enterprise software being used for business where correct licensing and license fees is a VERY VERY BIG legal deal and those level of fines are not just scare tactics. And this was software meant for IT crews to maintain legal compliance and crack down on inter-office copy sharing.

Corporations got cash up the wazoo, they can and always should pay for their licenses. Employees (or managers) pirating shit is just a grift in the business world.

That was true until the early 00s when people were getting destroyed in court for mp3 sharing.

All my homies hate proprietary codecs. Opus and ogg vorbis go brrrr

man its real interesting to see vintage stuff like this

Sounds like a threat, like they're saying, 'If you do this, we're gonna make you cough up that amount, so better steer clear, dude.'

0.05~0.10 for bulk floppy purchases and a screechy 14.4 modem, I remember those days fondly. Google says 100k fine in 1993 is equivalent to 210k in 2023. Still ridiculous.

And I just can't get that rap song "Don't copy that floppy" out of my head after seeing this xD

I would fucking too download a car if I could get the godsdamned thing to work.

Policemen stopped wearing helmets around here decades ago. But I'd shit in one anyways

"When you are illegally copying software you are committing DOS and Macintosh™"

Wild, OP did you see this posted on bluesky? I think I saw it there from the archive team guy.

...Hoping to cross paths with fellow blooskis on lemmy...