Where I live piracy is people on the street selling media with pirated content (currently, DVD-R and all... but there was a time when it was diskette or even tape too).
Sometimes they sell it for MORE than the original, so why people buy the pirated one?
Because the pirated one is often:
easier to pay (just hand over the cash instead of international wire).
better support (often the piracy dealers double as tech support!)
better patches (often pirated content is patched with fan patches, DRM removal, and whatnot)
better translation (often pirated content include fan translation).
Piracy was brought by microsoft and MPAA. Microsoft had a lot to win and they used piracy to consolidate market share. They never went after people except in some rare cases for publicity.
MPAA made sure that you cannot buy movies. In eastern europe they did not even had distributors but they were screaming bloody murder.
Pfffff!! In Argentina you could go to brick and mortar computer stores with your box of blank floppies and ask them to copy whatever game you wanted from a long dot-matrix printed list in a binder.
Years later, with CD writers, there was a website called “Ed Sullivan and his Cambodian slaves” [sic] with a long list of movies and TV shows you could have delivered home in a couple of days. Or just stroll to the park in the center of town where several stalls offered copies of all types of computer software, MP3 collections, games, movies, etc.
… There were also guys on trains, carrying a portable CD player, speakers and a battery, who sold music and movies.
While I see what you mean, a BBS was an inherently local thing, unless you fancied paying long-distance fees even if a distant BBS would accept LD calls at all. That might be acceptable for important texts and other very compact formats (small pictures, MIDI tracks), but for pirating music, let alone video, it was out of question.
The problem there is just technological: the problem with movies and video was the unavailability of good enough codecs/large enough media+bandwidth. Otherwise BBS would have been a hell of a party for those too.
For software my local BBSs, very very far from any rich country, somehow managed to get every major software release a few days before launch day. Yes, before. It was all one huge global network already, just a bit asynchronous.
My first 'piracy' would have been the copy of windows + office that my dad had at work and brought home to install on the home computer, well before I'd ever heard of the internet.
Sometimes they sell it for MORE than the original, so why people buy the pirated one?
Because the pirated one is often: