Nah, they increased the cost to drive people to the monthly subscription. I’m guessing in a year or two they’ll announce the lifetime subs have been revoked and everyone needs a monthly sub.

Friends and I would record off the radio and trade cassettes all the time.

Usually to copy VHS you needed a two VCR setup. My friends and I weren’t really into it, but we knew a couple of adults that were, and we suspected they swapped porn mainly.

The other bit of piracy we did was copying and swapping C64 floppy disks. The computer store in town rented C64 games (and other platforms) and the store owner was a family friend of one of my buddies. He’d supply us with the latest hot copy software as it was released, like Copy B, Copy C, and several others I can remember. So of course we rented tons of games and copied them. We became quite the dealers of our small C64 town group. But we never charged anything because it was mainly our friends.