Yeah, Napster was released in 1999 and was huge. Everyone in college in the early 00s was using file sharing networks to download stuff. It wasn’t everyone but it was pretty big.

The real answer is that many people in this thread are personally pirating less because they are old; when you have the money, it’s often just faster and easier to pay, and for games there are some genuine advantages to eg. owning a game on Steam so you can use cloud saves. Most piracy has always been teenagers and college students, since they often can’t buy the stuff they want.

This is the same reason why, in the late 90’s and early 00s, anime piracy in particular was huge - distribution barely existed for most shows and when it did it was wildly overpriced.

I was going to say, 2007 as the start date? lol.

I was downloading games off Home of the Underdogs in the 90s, and by the late 90s downloading anime off of file sharing had started to get big.

A local AI model, by definition, can only tell you stuff that’s in its training set. It’s not going to be able to give you up-to-date info about piracy.