I was a minor and it was 30 or so years ago, I don't think I'm at much risk. I think it was an interesting time in tech and worth sharing some of the details of what went on. Also, most of the people that served time weren't busted because of piracy alone, they were often involved in some adjacent crime like trading credit card numbers, buying/selling stolen equipment, malware, or some other fraud.
I imagine there are a bunch of us "Scene kids" around, Everyone I know that got arrested were the for same reasons. Ironically most of us ended up in very interesting positions / senior positions at a lot of modern companies. Our general rule of thumb was, don't make any money. I often wonder if there are old boxes sitting in storage around universities all over the US, that contain a ton of releases that have been lost to time.
I was in a situation at age 14. It was before the CFFA act so I was very, very lucky. And it helped that police back then didn’t really know what they were doing when it came to computers. But it scared my straight. Never did anything like that again.
That anti-profit motive is exactly the one I followed as well! Yep I remembered so many of the boxes we uploaded to were wired into a university network in random closets in MIT and other universities.
Yeah we had FXP hosts on most of the east coast universities. Those were the days of just having fun. Ironically it's the knowledge and experiences of being in the scene that quasi got me into working for the government and those letters agencies. I was fortunate that the only real trouble I caused was met with education and support rather than a harsh response. If I was born 5 years later with the slow deployment of ZERO tolerance policies I would have been screwed.
I still give back though, I have a few racked servers that are out there sharing torrents (all legal data), and run a bunch of crawlers for archive.org etc. It's as close as I can get these days to the olden days.
