A swashbuckling tale of Italian software piracy – 1983-1993 (2022) | Hacker News Reader

A swashbuckling tale of Italian software piracy – 1983-1993 (2022)

genesistemple.com

115 pointsalberto-m47 comments

Greetings from the USSR! In 1990, I was 15 years old and a high school student. Factory clones of the ZX Spectrum appeared in stores, and I often visited the stores, looking at the new computers on the shelves. I already had a programmable microcalculator. My mother worked as the head of the department of automated control of industrial production, she received her salary for a month and bought me a ZX Spectrum 48K computer with all the money, for this I am very grateful to my mother. I learned to program in BASIC and assembler. The computer came with a cassette with the games Zynaps, Exolon, Lode Runner, Boulder Dash, Is-Chess, Robin of the Wood. These games were English, exported through Poland. I knew three people in the whole school, owners of the ZX Spectrum, and it was a huge school, 11 thousand students studied there. We exchanged cassettes with games. Then I used the Copy-copy program, it was right on the tape included with my computer! To make a copy of a game, first the game was read from the tape recorder into the computer's memory for 5 minutes, then I put in a clean tape and recorded the game for 5 minutes, then I checked for another 5 minutes (Verify). Sometimes I came across games in Italian. Hello Italy! There were Polish magazines in Polish. In 2002, I started working in a gaming computer club. There were 12 computers connected by a local network. There were Counter Strike, Half-Life, Sims, GTA III, Warcraft and other games. Games and programs were sold in stores and kiosks. I still have a collection of disks. For example, this is a Windows XP Corporate disk, for which only a serial number was needed. I bought this disk in a store for 2 dollars. Now I use Debian 12. I cannot download a Windows disk image, since many sites are not available in Russia. I can only buy a laptop with Windows installed, but it is expensive.

My experience in mainland China cerca 2003 is notably missing from this thread.

Entire markets with "daoban" (pirate) DVDs, music, and importantly - English language software.

The fascinating thing was the corruption and collusion with local authorities; occasionally I would go to a shop almost completely barren, it's because cops were scheduled to show up soon.

This image shows how it was in Brazil around 2006:

the general manager of Worldwide Anti-Piracy at Microsoft, Keith Beeman, looking at the copies of Windows Vista and Office 2007 sold on Sao Paulo streets for R$10 (something like 5 USD).

https://web.archive.org/web/20070119230014im_/http://g1.glob...

The soviets would copy stuff too!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Antonov_...

It's not exactly a copy (though espionage took place): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_programme

There are numerous examples where soviets copied western technologies changing little except the name but Buran is not one of them.

This is an interesting movie along those lines, although it's about pirating music rather than games. The protagonists live in Naples.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_by_Erry

My wife said that in Eastern Europe in the 80s and early 90s it was common to go to a "record shop" and give a certain list of songs that the owner of the shop, who was just someone with access to some records, a record player and a cassette recorder, would copy to a cassette for a fee. This was the only way to get western music, and there were most certainly no copyright laws at all that would have regulated that.

Edit: I asked my wife for details and there was an actual shop offering this service, but they got their cassettes from another guy who was married to a stewardess. She brought CDs back from her trips abroad, and he made a business copying the CDs to cassettes and selling them. Eventually he got in trouble with an organized crime group who had learned that he was making good money and wanted a share of it. This was in the early 90s in Sofia/Bulgaria.

Do any communist nations respect copyright to the life-in-prison-for-violation degree that we in the US do?

How much was IP enforcement a driver of the west’s war on socialism and the Cold War?

In the 2000s and earlier China sure as heck didn’t care about western IP rights.

North Korea didn’t join the 1886 Berne Convention until 2003… so it probably was a free for all until then.

I can just imagine some guy in Pyongyang sitting with fully legal copies of every copyrighted work up until 2003.

> Do any communist nations respect copyright to the life-in-prison-for-violation degree that we in the US do?

No, for many reasons, the primary one is that "victimless" crime is a lot more common there, and a lot more necessary for survival / decent living conditions.

Things like stealing from your employer, slacking off as much as possible, copyright infringement, smuggling prohibited goods, selling alcohol / cigarettes without the required permits, nepotism, bribery etc were a lot more widespread in the communism days.

If you were building a house, it wouldn't be too unusual to get your bricks from a friend who worked at a construction site, your furniture from a friend who worked at a furniture factory, and so on. Most people lived like that, and skirting the law in that way wasn't really viewed as immoral by anybody.

We had a proverb saying something the lines of "no matter if you're standing around or lying down, you're still getting your salary." This was how most people approached life back then.

Re: copyright infringement specifically, most of the IP being copied was from western nations, which we weren't on particularly friendly terms with, so there was very little reason to do anything about it. You'd be helping the enemy economically for no gain for you (as we were incapable of producing any IP that the west wanted).

> How much was IP enforcement a driver of the west’s war on socialism and the Cold War?

IP enforcement, not much at all, national security and copying technology for military purposes were much larger concerns.

100 years ago they sure as heck didn't care about British IP rights in the United States.

As a cassette nerd and huge fan of Naples, Italy, I consider that one of the best movies I’ve watched in years.

I grew up in midwest small town USA, around 3500 people, in the 80s. I attended monthly C64 user group and it was pretty much nothing more than copying each others software.

Me too. My dad would go to "the computer club" and bring back some diskettes.

Best part was, most of the games were hobbyist efforts so I'd get a true floppy (5 1/2") that held maybe 320kb? And each side would have like 10 or 15 games each.

There was a later period on PCs in the 386/486 era where you would buy a magazine and it'd come with a CD loaded with games - back when shareware was a perfect vessel for marketing games that were easily stolen - good enough to sate a broke kid but also led to many Xmas gift wishlist items. iD had so much street cred in my circle.

Hmm. I never really knew where my dad got this mountain of Amiga disks. A mix of legit and not. As kids we would always find something new to play digging through them.

https://x.com/vyrotek/status/1722050918265274434

My neighbor in the early 90s was a 747 pilot on a regular route to Hong Kong. We’d give him a list of requests and a couple bucks and he’d come back with disks of whatever we wanted.

Ditto for the Atari user group meetings I attended here in Vancouver in the mid 80's.

Yeah, same for an Aussie Amiga group in '88 - wholesale piracy, everyone running XCOPY - looking through each other's disk-boxes and copying. I remember seeing ads in the local paper for software at $2 per disk, send SAE for free calalogue. The pirate scene for the Amiga back in those days was huge. We even had a local group that traded on an international scale, hooking everyone up with the big groups in Europe. Fun times for sure!

Here in Southern California in the 80's and 90's we just called them "copy parties".

We'd even hold them at respectable places sometimes like a bank's conference room someone somehow managed to get access to. Everyone brought a little folding table, and their C64s, and later Amigas.

I was also part of some cracking groups, making intros for them - FBR, Agile, Intense, TSM, and some others. I was also involved in some warez BBSs, making customizations to the BBS code. We did all the phone phreaking stuff too.

And as a consequence of being too involved in some of these people's lives, I now have both an FBI and Secret Service file on me. I had no repercussions, but my friends sure did (for the phone related stuff). The stories I could tell...

It really was the golden age of warez.

We had an Apple II club in Southern California in the early 80s that did the same thing. Couple dozen of us meeting once a month and sharing floppies. Multiple systems with 10 disk drives and using Penulticopy to make nine duplicates at a time. We all ended up with far more programs (mostly games) than we could ever use in our lifetime.

I eventually started a small dial-up BBS to trade warez amongst friends and play some multiplayer games, but stopped when the number got out and strangers started dialing in. Completely freaked me out and for the next few months thought the FBI was going to be knocking on my door.

I spent more on blank floppies during that era than legal software.

Yeah I was that weird guy that had multiple 1541 floppy drives at club meetups... lol

I do recall getting a cassette with a ton of games at the newspaper kiosk, and realizing only decades later those were all pirated titles, and wondering how that had happened.

This article finally made it click!

For me it was decades later that I finally realized that Mario and Luigi were not in fact cheap rip-offs of Giana and Maria and it was the other way round.

The Great Giana Sisters also had Chris Huelsbeck do the music.

And, arguably, Giana wasn't a cheap rip off. It was clearly inspired by it, and a better game on a better platform.

It wasn't cheap but also it wasn't better either. The controls and physics are very stiff in Great Giana Sisters. To me it always felt more like a tech demo, though that could be said for a lot of games of the era.

The Great Giana Sisters was a legitimate game though—while the gameplay was obviously almost identical to Super Mario Bros, code wise it was technically very advanced as far as C64 games went. The way you phrased it seems like it was a bootleg version of the NES game.

But Nintendo was just as litigious back then, so the game didn't last long.

Literally every newspaper kiosk, convenience store, etc had racks of cassettes in half of mainland Europe (esp. Italy, Spain, Portugal) during the 80s and 90s. I use to relish trips to the mainland to stock up on the latest ZX Spectrum games.

Later on they were a good source for those pirated multi-game carts for consoles.

You say mainland Europe, were you on a smaller island somewhere?

Yes :) In the UK it's common to call the rest of Europe "mainland Europe" to separate it from Europe the Continent which includes the UK.

I don't see how copying numbers is a problem, just because someone lined up the numbers in a particular way.

Calling it piracy is completely ridiculous too: pirates were killing, pillaging and stealing.

The real problem are the anti piracy law and the governments enforcing the will of large corporations.

It's all about the money.

When you get down to it in a capitalist society someone downloading a cracked videogame is worse than a sexual abuse victim in the Philippines. Life is cheap.

I too remember those years very well (from '83 onwards, when I managed to get a Sinclair ZX Spectrum as a gift). Magazines were very common at newsstands, but even in regular specialized stores, most of the games were pirated. I still have the instruction manual in Italian (completely counterfeit) for the game ELITE on the ZX Spectrum. The same happened when I bought a Commodore 128 three years later, and again a couple of years after that when I got an Amiga 500. You only had to go to the shop where you bought the computer to purchase games or other software. I still remember Deluxe Paint and a C compiler—if I’m not mistaken, it was Lattice C.

And shall we talk about the common practice of pirating DOS or Windows? Starting from Windows 95 onwards... Truly a different world. The illegality in that field was scandalous for entire decades... (and even now, in many professional offices, it's still common practice to use cracked copies of Adobe Acrobat...).

I once borrowed a Windows 95 CD from a fellow student. He had brought it from China. It looked totally legit, not at all home-burned with inkjet printed cover. A true original.

The only thing that gave it away was that in addition to Windows it had Doom on it.

I remember complaining to a friend a few years ago that my reverse-engineering and binary-patching skills were atrophied because there were so few Linux binaries which prompted users to enter a registration code to make them fully-functional.

Happily these days I still get to reverse things, and patch binaries, for my own amusement.

In more recent times, conspir4cy, or cpy, has been an Italian group cracking denuvo drm.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_warez_groups

They stopped being active a few years ago

I am Italian and I remember very well when, around the 90, I frequently go to the computer shop to buy copied games in 3.5 floppies with handwritten labels. They cost the equivalent of 2.5€ and frequently this was the best way to get a virus.

we probably went to the same shop. also same price! :D

I joined a bit later but I remember a very similar atmosphere with "modified" playstations and games "alla duchesca" :)

Interesting that it was quasi legal in Italy.

I remember being in Mexico City in the early 2000s and seeing dvds of software being sold. What was remarkable to me was some wasn’t games but professional applications like autocad and maya..

Hong Kong in 1998 had small stores with professional software piracy. "There are no software companies here" was the rumor.. all tech companies that had regular income and employees sold hardware. Any software development professionally was associated with a hardware company of some kind at that time there.

I remember being there, long queues of people buying copied floppy disks.

We even created “Game Doctor” which is basically a device that could jailbreak SFC to play games copies to floppies.

Same in Portugal during this time period, it was almost impossible to buy actual legal software for 8 and 16 bit home computers.

Most shops would have floppies and tapes, with covers that were copied mostly B&W, or a bit more pricy for colour.

With luck you could get some printout copies of the manuals as well, or very least the "copy protection codes".

The dream of most kids during the 8 bit days was a doule deck tape recorder.

Stuart Ashen (Ashens) just did a video about the topic of 1980s game piracy in Italy, but his video was mostly about the cover art. Many of the pirate versions of games stole their cover art from a book or movie poster, and his video shows the real game, the bootleg game, and shows where the cover art was stolen from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_PIxYFmA-Q

Good all times. As usual great quality content from genesistemple

I am from Naples and I must admit I was quite shocked when in my mid teens I learned software would normally be bought in the "official" ways; and for what prices :D

It was all shareware and cracked disks until then (probably a bit past then to be frank)

Bulgaria (and the rest of the eastern block) were cloning all kinds of computers. My first one was Pravetz 8C, which was really Apple ][/e or /c

One of our most prestiguos software/hardware companies employed people solely to pirate and translate tech.

https://sandacite.bg/%D0%B1%D1%8A%D0%BB%D0%B3%D0%B0%D1%80%D1...

Has several examples of screenshots from Karateka, Moon Patrol, and others translated in bulgarian.

lol.

> Arcade games were not exempt from being copied either. There was a whole black market of people working with arcade boards bought at various European fairs which would then proceed to copy each chip on the board by hand, in order to create a sort of 1:1 copy, to be sold all over the territory in hundreds of specimens.

And not just arcade games. Full on arcade cabs were copied. Many people who played in Europe on arcade machines (I remember those at the bowling and tennis club) were actually playing on fully "pirated" cab and PCBs.

I have such a vintage, bootleg, cab from the mid eighties since about ten years now. It looks like a Taito cab (the one they used a lot, with nice curves on the left and right of the screen: one of the nicest cab IMO) but it's not a 100% identical copy and someone obviously converted it to the JAMMA standard at some point.

I've got both vintage PCBs, bootleg PCBs and a Raspberry Pi with a Pi2JAMMA adapter.

Some of the games are still very fun to play.

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