disclaimer: even if there's nothing morally wrong with internet piracy it is still legally considered stealing so this isn't me encouraging you to go do internet piracy. because that would be me encouraging you to do a crime. so that's not what this is. as long as we're clear on that everyone knows free stuff is the best kind of stuff. some of the most fun activities also happen to be ones that require you to be clever and perseverant, and to solve puzzles and avoid obstacles. these are generally known as quests. now if only there was some kind of a quest you could go on that would require you to be clever and solve puzzles in order to obtain free stuff that would otherwise not be free. that would be a really fun and satisfying hobby and also not cost any money, i hear you say. well i have fantastic news for you.
if you're going to be a pirate the first thing you should probably decide is what you're looking for, because that will determine how you go about this. someone who wants a collection of files is going to have different needs than someone who just wants to look at stuff once and then move on to something else. i personally enjoy collecting files and organizing them, and i'll make a case for that later, but it's understandable why someone wouldn't want to download everything they're after. books and even music might be small, but if you're into movies or even full tv shows that can add up. it also relies on trusting files not to give you malware, which is a lot of trust to give to random strangers on the internet. if you do want your adventures to start and end in your browser, that's totally fine and fair. if you want to torrent stuff, i have no advice for you here as i don't generally torrent stuff, so you'll have to look elsewhere for that
so if you're looking to go about this without downloads, you'll be dealing with pirate sites. the problem with these is the same problem with all those sketchy youtube video downloader sites (which you don't need to use either, cobalt is great for most video platforms, and y232 handles playlists. neither of these are trying to sell you malware, stop using the bad sketchy ones) which is that while they do actually do the thing they advertise, they also do other stuff that is bad and you don't want. most pirate sites will have weird formatting and sketchy invasive ads, which even putting safety aside is annoying and disruptive to your experience. luckilly there's many things you can avoid using pirate sites for. if it's something old or obscure, check the internet archive first. if it's really old (public domain and the like) check project gutenberg. a lot of classic television gets posted by the copyright holders onto youtube and literally anything could be on dailymotion because it has the worst copyright moderating policy in the world. vimeo and bilibili will also have good stuff sometimes. if you're only looking for theater bootlegs, you have a separate protocol to follow and you can ignore most of what i'm saying, i'll get to you later. if none of the more legit sites have what you want, proceed to pirate sites. you may recognize some pirate sites by name, but pay attention to the domain, as basically any mildly popular website has a couple of clones floating around trying to get you to click on them thinking they were the real website using the same business model as rattatoing. don't just click on one thinking you've heard people talk about it so it must be a safe one, think of the thousand soap2day variants out there (this goes for any website by the way, i got a virus as a kid by clicking on a fake version of imgur one time). pay attention before clicking on anything and please get some sort of ad blocker, i reccommend ublock origin it's pretty great. i'm not going to link to any sites here, find some and use your best judgment, and if that doesn't satisfy you, you could always try downloading stuff.
now we get to downloading, which is my preferred method. before you embark on this voyage, you should have some idea of how you're storing your spoils. you could store them directly on your computer, but that can make it slower, and you don't want your vessel to be weighed down (is this metaohor getting tired yet?). there are file hosting platforms that have free versions, there's a bunch out there but my choice would be mega.nz because it has a 20 GB free version and is end-to-end encrypted, which is great if you ever want to share your collection with others. you can even set passwords and everything, it's pretty nice. it's much rarer for sites like mega or even mediafire or 4shared and the like to get searched for copyright material (those are also fine options they just have less free storage and encrypting than mega), but it does still happen sometimes so be aware. don't use google drive to store things because they absolutely are checking, and also don't use google in general but that's a different conversation. if you're storing a smaller collection, free options are perfecly fine, but at some point you may want to put a little money towards storage, which is still probably cheaper than a bunch of subscription services. if you're like me and my two terabytes of files, you'll want external storage, which is easy to get from little flash drives to big external hard drives, depends on how much storage you need and how much you want to spend. if you want to put serious money towards this, the best thing to get is a network attatched storage device, that way you can store a ton of shit and connect to it from anywhere without needing a drive at all, but those are pretty pricy and that's not in the spirit of the thing so i won't get into it here.
now that you have some storage plan, it's time to get searching. if you haven't heard of them before, allow me to introduce you to the magical concept of open directories. these are essentially file servers that contain the contents of someone's personal files that they made open to the public for whatever reason. usually this reason is piracy. they're huge empty voids with no visual flair or formatting, just miles of links. or like two or three links, some of them are very small. sometimes the files are named very clearly and thoroughly, and organized by year and genre and a thousand other things. sometimes the files are just named a string of numbers in a folder that's just named a string of letters. sometimes the site name is just someone's ip address. sometimes the site name is a long string of letters and numbers starting with ftp or dl. the point is you have no idea what you're getting before you click. it's like scrolling through neflix without paying for netflix and also if sometimes all netflix had was pictures of small german liquor bottles. i find these to be delightful and full of cool stuff. a word about them though, you are looking at servers made for hiding illegal files, so you will see porn at some point, it is just going to happen this is an even more common reason to use these things than pirated movies. usually these are in clearly labelled folders that are easy to not click on, but again, you never really know what you're going to see, so be prepared to see truly anything. but how do you find these things, you may ask. the subreddit for them is a great place to start, though the older a post is here the more likely the site is to be down, partially because more eyes means more visibilty to copyright shit and partially because these sites don't usually support a lot of traffic. a lot of the more well known ones shut down and pop up with a new link all the time. the subreddit is great for letting you know about slow download speeds and it marks when servers are nsfw, so it's a good resource. if you're looking for somethings specific and just need a place to download it from, there are actually search engines that crawl open directories. there's a handful but the best one is filepursuit as the most functional all around. filepursuit shows you the file sizes before you even click the links, which is also a way to confirm the site is still up, sites that don't display a file size are usually down. this still isn't foolproof, as files that aren't named the exact thing you searched for won't show up, but it's the quickest method out there. go look through some, it's fun to just look and see what's out there. here are a few of my favorites that are up at the time of writing this
so if you're into musicals there's a whole established system of recording and waiting and trading that essentially every video shared on youtube is breaking. have your opinions on this and whatever, but there is a long established community around theater bootlegs that is very organized and has a lot of rules. basic gist is sometimes people will give you recordings for asking nicely which is called a gift but mostly people trade for recordings they don't already have in their collections. most of these people have their own websites that are pretty easy to find and they keep very impressive lists of every recording they have, including exact dates they were taken and the casts involved, it honestly puts the other forms of pirates to shame. these people are also often very specific about what they like and what they will trade for, some will expect you to also have a list of your recordings so they can pick stuff out, others are more chill. most theater fans are really into specific shows and are obsessively looking for every recording of them that exists, so if you're also looking for versions of that show then find the fanatics, they will have more material than you could ever imagine exists (like me with the addams family musical, ask me for stuff i have everything). new shows are generally not for trading until a good while after the show closes to protect the identity of the person recording, though some of those recorders may accept payment to have access early (though that is probably the most legally dubious thing you could do in this situation, trading is slightly less so. also if you leak a nft recording nobody will ever trade with you again if they find out, so like. don't do that). they typically communicate over email, some are on other social medias and will respond to dms. if you're just getting started, here's some subreddits to check out, here's a tumblr blog to try. you can find a lot of things by looking for them on old blogs and forum posts, but you will unfortunately have to talk to people to get most of the good stuff here. if you do, please be nice, say thank you and all that.
often people will ask me about getting into pirating, and they wonder if it's safe to do. the simple answer is no, not really. no matter what way you do it, you're pretty much always going to sketchy websites and trusting random people not to ruin your computer. this isn't something you should get into without accepting the possibility that you may get a computer virus or two. but there are things you can do to be a little safer. use an antivirus, get something to block popups and trackers (seriously get ublock origin), and think before clicking. if a pirate site asks you to download its own personal vpn, don't do that, and probably don't stay on that page. if a download page opens different pages that aren't the thing you're downloading, close them and then probably don't stay on that page. also, understand file formats and file sizes. if something claims to be a full movie but is only a couple kilobytes, then there's no way that's actually a movie, and you shouldn't download it. if you don't recognize a file format then look it up before downloading, but here's a crash course in some basics. zip and rar need to be extracted and there could be anything in there. files ending in 001, 002, and so on are also zips, you just need to extract all of them at the same time. mp4, avi, m4v, and mkv are all totally valid video formats (though mkv is the best because you can have as many audio and subtitle tracks as you want without needing an extra srt file, sorry if you're on an apple device but at least you have vlc media player. actually you should be using vlc media player no matter what, it's the greatest video player out there it can even turn the video into a jigsaw puzzle if you want). if files come from a dvd and you want to keep the select menu intact, then the vob files provide the video and the ifo (info) and bup (backup) files provide the menu, you need to keep them in the same folder for it to work. pdf and epub are both good for books, epub needs special readers sometimes but it will also do the little page flip animations so that's fun. for comic books, cbz and cbr files have all the panels as individual images zipped together, some people like that but you can also convert them to pdfs if you prefer reading like that. exe is for programs, unless you're downloading games don't mess with that and even then you would be emulating and probably using rom files instead, don't download executables unless you 100% know what they are and who made them, if something is claiming to be a movie or something and it's got an exe format then do not touch that shit. basically if something claims to be one type of file but is actually a totally different file format then don't trust it or wherever you found it from.
i know this was a lot of information and most of it was probably either really overwhelming or really obvious to you. this last point is probably the most obvious but also the most overlooked. as a pirate, you should have a crew. you can't store everything you would possibly want to ever look at, but you have friends who have interests as well. maybe you only want to watch a few episodes of a show and don't want to download a bunch of episodes for that, but your friend loves that show and has every episode stored somewhere. maybe your friend wants to know where to find a particular comic, and you have every issue downloaded. maybe you got some old tech that didnt come with a manual but you know someone who collects scans of old manuals. the point of piracy is about free stuff and exploration, but more than anything it's about making the cool shit you like accessible and shareable. you should share your collection with your friends and they should share theirs with you, and between the bunch of you and your varied interests, you can have a real treasure trove. so enjoy your adventures, and bon voyage!
