> Many many many people "cracked" their software who where not eganged in the act of copyright infringement, they legally owned the software but for a number of reasons has no desire to run the invasive software bundled with the game or content they purchased.

Yes, many people. But not “many many many” people. You try to make it sound like cracking to pirate was minority use case.

It was a valid use case, sure, but as big as using torrents to download Linux ISOs.

I seem to recall that for some games the community recommended fix for performance problems was to install a crack so that the game wouldn't try to read stuff from the CD, which might be slow depending on the drive you have, and would be very slow if the CD has some scratch so the drive repeatedly attempted to read the same spot until it succeeded.

Sure, and I don't question that. But at the same time - 99% of people outside of western countries had pirated copies of games (because it was legal in many countries, plus paying normal price was often month+ salary for a single game). Tons of teenagers from western countries (main gamers back in the days) had pirated games, unless they came from a rich family.

Cracks helped to fix some serious usability issues (as DRM removal nowadays also helps with), but let's not rewrite history to pretend that was what majority of people used them for.

my favorite use was for software that required a USB dongle. if you lost the dongle, you lost access to the software. there is not "back up" option. so the cracking community came up with a way to emulate those dongles. the obvious abuse followed. we used the software for legit 1:1 installs to physical dongle on blade servers where all of the dongles could not be installed

My favourite failure case of this is dongles on hardware devices, like lighting controllers. Especially when the dongle does in on an exposed edge of the device and can get knocked loose.

I've heard stories of them getting disconnected because they were bumped, and the whole unit goes dead five minutes later. At least it's not immediate.

I nursed my Lightwave dongle through my early career as an animator. I've lost so many pairs of glasses, several wallets, a couple of phones, but I know exactly which drawer that usb stick is sitting in now. Not that I reckon I'll ever touch LW again.

The term "pirate" definitely predates the 90's and RIAA, etc. We used it quite liberally in the 80's BBS era.

That was the scariest term they could come up with? The romantic swashbuckling seafarer, antagonising empires and declaring his own rules? Surely they could have done better.

'software fraud', 'software theft', 'forgery'... hmm well there's a reason I don't work in marketing obviously.

They did those as well, and they also paid for extensive marketing material to make it seem like buying a cracked game was directly contributing to a mafia that was planning on killing your granny.

Do you not remember the ads? The "you wouldn't steal a car"?

Piracy is just what they were able to get. Should have hired the bank's PR managers, who turned "failing to do due diligence on a customer's identity" into the customer's problem.

Wasn’t it “You wouldn’t download a car”?

Which ended up being quite funny, because I very much would download a car

It was "you wouldn't steal a car". People on the internet rightly corrected it to "download".

Real piracy happens today. Men with machine guns in speedboats. It's not very romantic.

The use of "piracy" to describe unauthorised publication of a copyrighted work dates back to the 18th century, it's not something the MPAA came up with.

You're right! Etymonline traces it back to 1706 (without a source) [0], and I found it in the original Webster's [1]:

> A bookseller that seizes the copies or writings of other men without permission.

> PI'RATE, verb transitive To take by theft or without right or permission, as books or writings.

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/pirate#etymonline_v_16375

[1] https://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/Pirate

Another alternative to cracking was to use something like DAEMON Tools to emulate the CD in the drive with an .iso so you could legitimately play multiplayer games without having to deal with stupid CD checks.

Daemon tools was the bomb