In my family we swap around portable hard drives loaded up with movies. Mostly orchestrated by my aunt who started the tradition. Before then, it was burned DVDs and before then it was copied VHS tapes. When I was a kid my mother showed me how to circumvent copy protection on VHS by connecting a VCR to a VHS camcorder, although I forget which was doing the playback and which was doing the recording. It was a neat way to circumvent macrovision though.