‘South Park’ Was One of the First Shows to Be Pirated Online

Thanks to the current glut of pricey streaming services, online piracy has been on the rise. Last year, Hollywood studios began cracking down on pirate websites again, thereby attempting to ensure that audiences will actually pay for their movies and TV shows — even though buying digital content legitimately doesn’t necessarily mean that you get to keep it.

But back in the ‘90s, when AOL was still a thing, and searching the internet meant asking a cartoon butler for help, getting movies and shows online was quite rare. Then came South Park.

As Time Magazine reported back in 1998, one of the most prominent shows in the early days of online piracy was South Park. There were multiple fan-created websites sharing episodes of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s cartoon, via the information superhighway. These websites included “Mr. Hat’s Hellhole” and “www.YouKilledKenny.com.” Time actually spoke to one of these nefarious intellectual property thieves, who turned out to be a “19-year-old sophomore at Drexel University.” 

As far as we know, he wasn’t arrested by the FBI and taken on a tour of the millionaires he was hurting.

These days, pirated TV shows are digital files with solid picture and sound quality. But back in ‘98, South Park bootleggers were a little less technologically sophisticated. “Park-ophiles simply record episodes on their VCRs and squeeze the signals into their PCs using a nifty piece of digitizing software called RealVideo,” the outlet explained. 

Yeah, they literally had to tape the show off of TV before uploading the VHS recording to the internet. Imagine spending multiple hours downloading a show using a dial-up internet connection only to have it look like this:

The student argued that he was “performing a public service” since the show was “enormously popular with 18-to-25-year-olds” but “most college students don’t have cable.” And while other TV shows would look especially garbagey after the VHS to RealVideo transfer, South Park’s uniquely “low production values” made it “ideal for online distribution.”

Comedy Central was seemingly nonplussed by the new technology. “We really aren’t sure what to do,” Larry Lieberman, “a savvy Web user” that “Comedy Central charged with handling this situation,” stated. “We do want to protect our property, but we don’t want to alienate our fans,” he admitted. If only that guy was also Metallica’s manager. 

Lieberman pointed out that the rogue South Park sites were actually helping to keep interest in the show alive. “With a new episode every week, the itch gets scratched on television,” he reasoned. “But we can’t create episodes fast enough.”

The network did announce their intentions to shut some South Park-themed piracy sites down, but only the ones that were “selling ads,” lest anyone make ad revenue from South Park other than Comedy Central.