Warez
Warez refers to pirated software and other copyrighted digital media—such as video games, movies, music, and e-books—illegally distributed online, often after bypassing digital rights management. The term, derived from "software", is pronounced like "wares". Warez is typically shared via peer-to-peer networks, file-hosting services, and IRC. The global community involved is known as The Scene. Warez culture dates back to the 1980s and remains embedded in online communities. Its distribution generally violates copyright law and continues to raise legal and ethical concerns.
Terminology
Warez, and its leetspeak form W4r3z, are plural representations of the word "ware", and are terms used to refer to "irated software distributed over the Internet," that is, "oftware that has been illegally copied and made available" e.g., after having "protection codes de-activated". "Cracking", or circumventing copy protection, is an essential part of the warez process," and via this commonality, the definition focused on computer software has been extended to include other forms of material under copyright protection, especially movies. As Aaron Schwabach notes, the term covers both supported and unsupported materials, and legal recourses aimed at stemming the creation and distribution of warez are designed to cover both profit-driven and "enthusiast" practitioners. Hence, the term refers to copyrighted works that are distributed without fees or royalties and so traded in general violation of copyright law.The term warez, which is intended to be pronounced like the word "wares", was coined in the 1990s; its origin is with an unknown member of an underground computing circle, but has since become commonplace among Internet users and the mass media. It is used most commonly as a noun: "My neighbour downloaded 10 gigabytes of warez yesterday"; but has also been used as a verb: "The new Windows was warezed a month before the company officially released it". The global collection of warez groups has been referred to as "The Warez Scene," or more ambiguously "The Scene."
While the term 'piracy' is commonly used to describe a significant range of activities, most of which are unlawful, the relatively neutral meaning in this context is "...mak use of or reproduc the work of another without authorization". Some groups object to the use of this and other words such as "theft" because they represent an attempt to create a particular impression in the reader:The FSF advocates the use of terms like "prohibited copying" or "unauthorized copying", or "sharing information with your neighbor." Hence, the term "software pirate" is controversial; FSF derides its use, while many self-described pirates take pride in the term, and some groups fully embrace it.
Direct download sites are web locations that index links to locations where files can be directly downloaded to the user's computer; many such sites link to free file hosting services, for the hosting of materials. DDL sites do not directly host the material and can avoid the fees that normally accompany large file hosting.
Motivations and arguments
The production and/or distribution of warez is illegal in most countries due to the protections provided in the TRIPS Agreement. Software infringers generally exploit the international nature of the copyright issue to avoid law enforcement in specific countries. Violations are typically overlooked in poorer third world countries, and other countries with weak or non-existent protection for intellectual property. Additionally, some first world countries have loopholes in legislation that allow the warez to continue.There is also a movement, exemplified by groups like The Pirate Party and scholars at The Mises Institute, that the very idea of intellectual property is an anathema to free society. This is in contrast to some of the more traditional open source advocates such as Lawrence Lessig, who advocate for middle ground between freedom and intellectual property.
Legality
Generally, there are four elements of criminal copyright infringement: the existence of a valid copyright, that copyright was infringed, the infringement was willful, and the infringement was either substantial, or for commercial gain. Offering warez is generally understood to be a form of copyright infringement that is punishable as either a civil wrong or a crime.Often, sites hosting torrent files claim that they are not breaking any laws because they are not offering the actual data; rather, the sites only offer a link to other places or peers that contain the infringing material. However, many prosecution cases and convictions argue to the contrary. For instance, Dimitri Mader, the French national who operates a movie distribution warez site, Wawa-Mania, was fined 20,000 € and sentenced, in absentia, to a year in jail by a European court, for his role in managing the site. In the U.S., through 2004, more than 80 individuals had been prosecuted and convicted for trade in warez products, for movie and software pirating in particular, with a number of individuals being imprisoned, including some enthusiast traders.
However, laws and their application to warez activities may vary greatly from country to country; for instance, while Wawa-Mania is under sanction in France, it remains in operation via a host in Moldova, and through use of an Ecuadorian top-level domain. Hence, while high-profile web hosts and domain providers generally do not permit the hosting of warez, and delete sites found to be hosting them, private endeavours and small commercial entities continue to allow the trade in warez to continue. And, in some countries, and at some times, software "piracy" has been encouraged, and international and usual national legal protections ignored. A dispute between Iran and United States over membership in WTO and subsequent U.S. block of Iran's attempts at full-membership has led Iran to encourage the copying of U.S. software; hence, there has been a subsequent surge in Iranian "warez" and "crackz" websites. The same policy has been adopted by Antigua, and others.
Distribution
Warez are often distributed outside of The Scene by torrents uploaded to a popular P2P website by an associate or friend of the cracker or cracking crew. An nfo or FILE ID.DIZ is often made to promote who created the release. It is then leeched by users of the tracker and spread to other sharing sites using P2P, or other sources such as newsgroups. From there, it can be downloaded by millions of users all over the world. Often, one release is duplicated, renamed, then re-uploaded to different sites so that eventually, it can become impossible to trace the original file. Another increasingly popular method of distributing Warez is via one-click hosting websites. In the early 1990s, warez were often published on bulletin boards that had a warez section.Rise of software infringement
Unauthorized copying has been an ongoing phenomenon that started when high quality, commercially produced software was released for sale. Whether the medium was cassette tape or floppy disk, cracking enthusiasts found a way to duplicate the software and spread it without the permission of the maker. Bootlegging communities were built around the Apple II, Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit computers, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, Atari ST and other systems. Entire networks of BBSes sprang up to traffic illegal software from one user to the next. Machines like the Amiga and the Commodore 64 had an international network, through which software not available on one continent would eventually make its way to every region via bulletin board systems.It was also common in the 1980s to use physical floppy disks and the postal service for spreading software, in an activity known as mail trading. Prior to the sale of software that came on CD-ROM discs and after hard drives had become available, the software did not require the floppy disc to be in the drive when starting and using the program. So, a user could install it onto their computer and mail the disk to the next person, who could do the same. Particularly widespread in continental Europe, mail trading was even used by many of the leading cracker groups as their primary channel of interaction. Software copyright violation via mail trading was also the most common means for many computer hobbyists in the Eastern bloc countries to receive new Western software for their computers.
Copy-protection schemes for the early systems were designed to defeat casual duplication attempts, as "crackers" would typically release a copied game to the "pirate" community the day they were earmarked for market.
A famous event in the history of software copyright policy was an open letter written by Bill Gates of Microsoft, dated February 3, 1976, in which he argued that the quality of available software would increase if "software piracy" were less prevalent. However, until the early 1990s, software copyright infringement was not yet considered a serious problem by most people. In 1992, the Software Publishers Association began to battle against this phenomenon, with its promotional video "Don't Copy That Floppy". It and the Business Software Alliance have remained the most active anti-infringement organizations worldwide, although to compensate for extensive growth in recent years, they have gained the assistance of the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, as well as American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers and Broadcast Music Incorporated.
Today most warez files are distributed to the public via bittorrent and One-click hosting sites. Some of the most popular software companies that are being targeted are Adobe, Microsoft, Nero, Apple, DreamWorks, and Autodesk, to name a few. To reduce the spread of illegal copying, some companies have hired people to release "fake" torrents, which look real and are meant to be downloaded, but while downloading the individual does not realize that the company that owns the software has received their IP address. They will then contact their Internet service provider, and further legal action may be taken by the company/ISP.