Like that infamous “ET” torrent in 1982 where it involved a “pirate” sneaking a huge JVC camcorder (with a VHS reel) recording the entire movie in theaters, given this was before DVD’s existed (don’t even ask about pirate bay, those weren’t available yet). The same applies to “torrented” music, one would have a spare tape cassette recording the song played via the radio, that’s how they torrented content back then if they can’t afford an official copy.
Only millennials or Gen X who were kids back then would’ve encountered or witnessed VHS or Cassette “torrents” from either friends or family and often or not, piracy in the pre internet days was rife even before torrent sites were a thing. There are VHS “torrents” of TV shows or series (placing a camcorder which faces the TV screen with a spare reel recording the entire show (ads included), then used to fast forward upon replay.
…we bought our first VHS recorder in the late seventies, when very few films were released on videocassette and the MSRP for commercial films was around $360 (inflation-adusted to 2026), so everyone’s libraries pretty much comprised bootlegs and television broadcast recordings…those old tape-trading networks (which my mother called the ‘black market’) promulgated notoriously-sketchy multi-generation copies by modern standards, but the novelty of watching hollywood films at home was so profound that nobody gave much consideration to recording artifacts compromising the video quality…
…that huge expense for commercial releases essentially built the video-rental market in the early eighties (despite hollywood’s repeated attempts to quash it) and it wasn’t until the advent of ‘priced to own’ films in the late eighties (around $50 inflation-adjusted) that people began collecting legitimate commercial releases for their home libraries, creating a huge new market which transformed the film industry as profoundly as did cable television fifteen years earlier and streaming fifteen years later…