In the early '80s, BBSes were a source of piracy. Also, local user groups would share ir rent tapes of software ‘only to be used that month,’ with a wink and a nod.

In the mid-'80s, I was downloading…images from FTP sites around the world, and also assembling multi-part uuencoded files from Usenet.

This was all before the web, and It wasn’t new then.