Travel with me, over 20 years back in time, to 2004. Usher, Lil Jon, and Ludacris have just teamed up to record the year’s biggest musical hit: Yeah! They beat out Alicia Keys, Maroon 5, Ciara, and even Outkast for Billboard’s #1 spot. Meanwhile, the box office is dominated by sequels—Shrek 2, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and Spider-Man 2 (the one with Tobey Maguire). The breakout hit? Pixar’s The Incredibles.

You get home from school early, turn on the TV, and while it warms up you pick a DVD. You open the DVD tray and drop in your well-loved disc of Pirates of the Caribbean. Shiny side down. When you press “play,” you’re hit with loud, distorted rock and roll. Then a familiar, annoying PSA you aren’t allowed to skip fills the screen. A girl is sitting at her desktop downloading a movie on Limewire when a siren blares and words flash across the screen: “You wouldn’t steal a car.” See it embedded below:

This is the 50-second TV spot that equated torrenting a movie to jimmying the lock on a Mercedes 280E and committing car theft. And for film fans of a certain age, it’s seared into our memory. As a young motorhead, the teenage thug stealing that classic Mercedes certainly got my attention. But there may be an ironic twist to the PSA’s creation.

How the “You wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy PSA came to be

The spot is officially titled “Piracy. It’s a Crime.” By the early 2000s, “peer sharing” websites such as Limewire allowed people to legally swap files such as movies with friends. But soon, strangers all over the world were trading copyrighted material—and the movie studios got spooked. The Federation Against Copyright Theft, the Motion Picture Association, and the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore teamed up to create the above PSA. It was bundled into DVDs from Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Buena Vista Pictures until 2007.

There were once rumors that the distorted guitar soundtrack had been used without permission. The short film’s creators later dispelled those claims. But then a woman named Melissa Lewis looked into something else—the font. It closely resembles a gritty 1992 typeface called FF Confidential, designed by Dutch typographer Just van Rossum. But it’s not the same.

The font used in the ad is actually a knockoff of Rossum’s creation called XBAND Rough. These kinds of unauthorized imitations are often used to avoid paying licensing fees to the original designers. You might even call it… piracy.

When asked about the knockoff font in the PSA, Just van Rossum said, “I had known about the ‘illegal clone’ of my font before, but I didn’t know that that was the one used in the campaign.”

Even though he makes his living by creating trademarked intellectual property, van Rossum wasn’t a fan of the PSA. “The campaign has always had the wrong tone, which (to me) explains the level of fun that has been had at its expense… The irony of it having used a pirated font is just precious.”

But you would steal a car…

Fast-forward 20 years, and Limewire is far from the worst trouble the internet has stirred up. Today, we have the “Kia Boys” teaching TikTok users how to steal cars using nothing but a USB cable. We’re seeing a rise in teens actually stealing cars—not for profit or transportation, but for viral content. It’s called the “Kia Challenge” or “Hyundai Challenge.”

I’m not saying the You wouldn’t steal a car PSA was prophetic. It’s just funny to remember that, in 2004, torrenting movies was the worst internet crime we could imagine.