I mean, if we’re not restricting “media piracy” to digital, there was an entire subculture that ran bootlegs of live music events for the diehard connoisseurs, and the archivists had insane collections dating long into those pre-digital decades —including completely unpublished instances of world famous bands like The Grateful Dead, The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, CCR, Jimi Hendrix, etc.

But, hey, it’s not like modern day has seen corpo dumbasses scramble to recover data corrupted by time, shitty storage SoP, etc., only to tap one or more of these driven, fastidious, longtime collectors to ask if they could burn/dub/cut a copy… you know, like pirates. 🤣