Remember the days before streaming services were a thing? Yep, basically that: as in people would burrow a rented copy from a friend who paid money to obtain a official copy on DVD from blockbuster then ripping the contents into those blank DVDs (the white ones) meaning they’ve pirated a copy for home use but it’s still a “torrent”. I remember watching a ripped copy of Finding Nemo (or other kids movies from that era) when I was younger.
The same with “lending” a purchased copy from a store a friend has proceeding to rip the DVD content onto a blank DVD having a copy. Then there are CAM’s (pirates using a video camera to record the film upon being shown in theaters) usually they do this around the debut (new releases in cinema) by sneaking a camcorder but the footage is shit (I remember back in 2010, I’ve seen Alice in Wonderland via CAM and it sucked due to bad resolution and audio).
I’ve seen some pretty funny cam records, people that would be filming the top of other people’s heads half of the time, random talking and laughter, cam being dropped or the person not noticing it was now pointed at the front sit instead of the screen… and there was a curious thing when those betting mafias started, they started flooding the internet with a lot of cam records directly from the projection room, so they had good quality as framing goes but audio was shitty, and most of those seem to have come from Russia and they’d have audio and subtitles in random languages (with your local subtitles burned in the file over the subtitles on the theater screen) and tons of ads, especially 1xbet… but hey, you could watch the latest Marvel or Star Wars movie on the internet same day of release.