Warez scene

Warez hierarchy.

The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene,^[1] is an underground community of people that specialize in the distribution of copyrighted material, including television shows and series, movies, music, music videos, games (all platforms), applications (all platforms), ebooks, and pornography. The Scene is meant to be hidden from the public, only being shared with those within the community. However, as files were commonly leaked outside the community and their popularity grew, some individuals from The Scene began leaking files and uploading them to filehosts, torrents and ed2k.

The Scene has no central leadership, location, or other organizational conventionals. The groups themselves create a ruleset for each Scene category (for example, MP3 or TV) that then becomes the active rules for encoding material. These rulesets include a rigid set of requirements that warez groups (grps) must follow in releasing and managing material. The groups must follow these rules when uploading material, and if the release has a technical error or breaks a rule, other groups may "nuke" (flag as bad content) the release. Groups are in constant competition to get releases up as fast as possible, even though there are no real "rewards" for their work (except for access to The Scene). First appearing around the time of BBSes, The Scene is composed primarily of people dealing with and distributing media content for which special skills and advanced software are required.

History

The warez scene started emerging in the 1970s, used by predecessors of software cracking and reverse engineering groups. Their work was made available on privately run bulletin board systems (BBSes).^[2] The first BBSes were located in the U.S., but similar boards started appearing in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and mainland Europe. At the time, setting up a machine capable of distributing data was not trivial and required a certain amount of technical skill. The reason it was usually done was for technical challenge. The BBSes typically hosted several megabytes of material. The best boards had multiple phone lines and up to one hundred megabytes of storage space, which was very expensive at the time.^[3] Releases were mostly games and later software.

As the world of software development evolved to counter the distribution of material and as the software and hardware needed for distribution became readily available to anyone, The Scene adapted to the changes and turned from simple distribution to actual cracking of the protections and non-commercial reverse engineering.^[2] As many groups of people who wanted to do this emerged, a requirement for promotion of individual groups became evident, which prompted the evolution of the Artscene, which specialized in the creation of graphical art associated with individual groups.^[4] The groups would promote their abilities with ever more sophisticated and advanced software, graphical art, and later also music (demoscene).^[5]

The subcommunities (artscene, demoscene, etc.), which were doing nothing illegal, eventually branched off. The programs containing the group promotional material (coding/graphical/musical presentations) evolved to become separate programs distributed through The Scene and were nicknamed Intros and later Cracktros.

The demoscene grew especially strong in Scandinavia, where annual gatherings are hosted.^[6]

Release procedure

When releasing material, groups must first encode properly so as not to be nuked, which shows up as a cautionary flag to potential users. After encoding, they upload the files to a topsite that is a FTP server where all the files originate. When the upload is complete, they execute a command that causes the name and category of the release to be announced in the topsite's IRC channel. New releases are also announced 0sec (meaning seconds to minutes after official scene pre) on various public websites.^[7] This is called a "pre" release. Once this is done, all other releases for the same material are nuked as duplicates ("dupes"). However, if there is a technical error or the file breaking the ruleset for the category, the original "pre" release will be nuked. Other groups then encode the same material and release it with a "PROPER" tag in the filename. The same group may re-encode the file, with the new release marked as "REPACK". This FTP server and IRC are hidden and closed to the public.

Each release in The Scene consists of a folder containing the material (sometimes split into RAR pieces), plus an NFO and SFV file. The NFO is a text file which has essential information about the file(s) encoded, including a reason for the nuke if the file is a PROPER or REPACK release. A robust NFO file may contain a group's mission statement, recruitment requirements, greetings, and contact info; many groups have a standard ASCII art template for the file, with the most prolific exhibiting elaborate artistic examples. The SFV file uses checksums to ensure that the files of a release are working properly and have not been damaged or tampered with. This is typically done with the aid of an external executable like QuickSFV or SFV Checker. Failure to include an NFO or SFV file in the release will generally result in a nuke, as these are essential components of the warez standard to which The Scene adheres.

In 2012, the Scene had over 100 active groups releasing material. Over 1,000 releases are made each day, with a cumulative total of more than five million releases through 2012.^[8][9]

Crackers and reverse engineers

Cracking has been the core element of The Scene since its beginning. This part of The Scene community specializes in the creation of software cracks and keygens. The challenge of cracking and reverse engineering complicated software is what makes it an attraction.^[10] The game cracking group SKIDROW described it as follows in one of their NFO files:^[11]

Keep in mind we do all this, because we can and because we like the
thrilling excitement of winning over the other competing groups. We
absolutely don't do all these releases, to please the general user that
rather want to spend their cash on updating to the latest hardware, and
see's the scene releases as a source to play all these games for free. 

Enjoy playing and remember if you like it, support the developer!

The game ripping group MYTH expressed it as follows in their NFO files:^[12]

We do this just for FUN. We are against any profit or commercialisation
of piracy. We do not spread any release, others do that.
In fact, we BUY all our own games with our own hard earned and worked for
efforts. Which is from our own real life non-scene jobs.
As we love game originals. Nothing beats a quality original.

"If you like this game, BUY it. We did!"

David Grime, former DrinkOrDie member, describes the motivation of the warez scene as follows: It's all about stature. They are just trying to make a name for themselves for no reason other than self-gratification.^[13][14]

Criticism

In 2011, the group LEGACY wrote in the NFO files of the first Nintendo 3DS scene releases the following:

Its sad to see how little talent these "groups" that    
are considered to form the "scene" of today actually    
possess. Is there actually anything you can do without  
the help of Chinese flashcard makers or independent     
homebrew coders? If you look further than the countless 
amounts of shovelware, serial dupes and old crap, I     
guess the answer is pretty obvious. Despite the fancy   
nfos and namedropping, you're no better than the        
anonymous bittorrent releaser. The distribution might be
different, but the spirit is the same.

They continued with greeting groups they think will be remembered as legends of the console scene.^[15]

See also

• Legal aspects of file sharing
• Copyright infringement
• Crack intro
• FXP board
• Topsite
• Standard (warez)
• The Scene - miniseries
• How Music Got Free - book by Stephen Witt
• List of warez groups
• SCA (computer virus) - first computer virus for the Commodore Amiga, created by Swiss Cracking Association^[16]
• Twilight - pressed warez disks sold in the Netherlands in the late nineties using scene releases

References

Further reading

• Rau, Lars (2004-10-22). Phänomenologie und Bekämpfung von "Cyberpiraterie": eine kriminologische und kriminalpolitische Analyse [Phenomenology and combat "cyber piracy": a criminological and criminal policy analysis] (Ph.D.) (in German). Justus-Liebig-Universität. ISBN 3-86537-246-5. Retrieved 2013-07-27. 
• van der Wal, Jan Adriaan (2009). The "rise" and "fall" of the MP3scene: A Global and Virtual Organization - An organizational, social relational and technological analysis (Thesis). 
• Huizing, Ard; van der Wal, Jan A. (2014-10-06). "Explaining the rise and fall of the Warez MP3 scene: An empirical account from the inside". First Monday. 19 (10). doi:10.5210/fm.v19i10.5546. ISSN 1396-0466. 
• Hitzler, R., Niederbacher, A. (2010). Leben in Szenen: Formen Juveniler Vergemeinschaftung Heute [Living in Scenes. Forms of Youth Communities] (in German). VS Verlag fur Sozialwissenschaften GmbH. ISBN 9783531925325. Retrieved 2013-06-23.  CS1 maint: Multiple names: authors list (link)
• Sockanathan, Andrew (2011). Digital Desire and Recorded Music: OiNK, Mnemotechnics and the Private BitTorrent Architecture (Ph.D.). Goldsmiths, University of London, Centre for Cultural Studies. 
• Wasiak, Patryk (2014-04-15). ""Amis and Euros." Software Import and Contacts Between European and American Cracking Scenes". WiderScreen (1-2). 
• Ernesto (2009-02-20). "Anakata Explains in Court How 'The Scene' Works". 
• Mueller, Gavin (2014). "The Social Ecology of Early Software Piracy".  Presentation at the 2014 Cultural Studies Association conference in Salt Lake City.
• Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy, Viking (June 16, 2015), hardcover, 304 pages, ISBN 978-0525426615

External links

• Scene history in video on YouTube
• The Recollection Magazine - Recollections of the early scene.
• Ultimate C64 Scene Mag Archive - Collection of C64 disk and paper magazines.