Warez - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Warez refers primarily to copyright

Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...

ed works distributed without fees or royalties, and may be traded, in general violation of copyright law. The term generally refers to unauthorized releases by organized groups, as opposed to file sharing

File sharing

File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multimedia , documents, or electronic books. It may be implemented through a variety of ways...

between friends or large groups of people with similar interest using a darknet. It usually does not refer to commercial software counterfeiting. This term was initially coined by members of the various computer underground circles, but has since become commonplace among Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

users and the mass media

Mass media

Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...

Etymology

The word warez is a leetspeak plural form of ware, short for computer software

Computer software

Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it....

. Thus it is intended to be pronounced like the word wares, ˈwɛərz, but people commonly mispronounce the e, ˈwɑrɛz, as in the English pronunciation of Juárez

Juárez

Juárez may refer to a number of places and things, most of which are named after Benito Juárez, President of Mexico on several occasions during the 19th century.Mexican cities and towns...

.

Warez is used most commonly as a noun

Noun

In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...

: "My neighbour downloaded 10 gigabyte

Gigabyte

The gigabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage. The prefix giga means 109 in the International System of Units , therefore 1 gigabyte is...

s of warez yesterday"; but has also been used as a verb: "The new Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

was warezed a month before the company officially released it". The collection of warez groups is referred to globally as the "warez scene" or more ambiguously "The Scene".

Warez distribution

Warez are often distributed outside of The Scene (a collection of warez groups) by torrents (files including tracker info, piece size, uncompressed file size, comments, and vary in size from 1 k, to 400 k.) uploaded to a popular P2P website by an associate or friend of the cracker or cracking crew. An nfo

.nfo

.nfo is a commonly used three-letter filename extension of ASCII or extended ASCII text files that accompany other files and contain information about them. Such NFO files can be viewed with text editors or dedicated NFO viewers...

or FILE ID.DIZ

FILE ID.DIZ

FILE_ID.DIZ is a plain text file containing a brief contentdescription of the archive in which it is included.It was originally used in archives distributed through bulletin board systems ....

is often made to promote who created the release. It is then leeched (downloaded) by users of the tracker

BitTorrent tracker

A BitTorrent tracker is a server that assists in the communication between peers using the BitTorrent protocol. It is also, in the absence of extensions to the original protocol, the only major critical point, as clients are required to communicate with the tracker to initiate downloads...

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 traded on cassette tapes with different groups and published on bulletin boards that had a warez section.

Rise of software piracy

Piracy 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, software pirates found a way to duplicate the software and spread it without the permission of the maker. Thriving pirate communities were built around the Apple II

Apple II

The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer and introduced in 1977...

, Commodore 64

Commodore 64

The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Commodore International in January 1982.Volume production started in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US$595...

, the Atari 400 and Atari 800 line, the ZX Spectrum

ZX Spectrum

The ZX Spectrum is an 8-bit personal home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research Ltd...

, the Amiga

Amiga

The Amiga is a family of personal computers that was sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities...

, and the Atari ST

Atari ST

The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was released by Atari Corporation in 1985 and commercially available from that summer into the early 1990s. The "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", which referred to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals...

, among other personal computers. Entire networks of BBS

Bulletin board system

A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...

es sprang up to traffic illegal software from one user to the next. Machines like the Amiga

Amiga

and the Commodore 64

Commodore 64

had an international pirate network, through which software not available on one continent would eventually make its way to every region via bulletin board system

Bulletin board system

s.

It was also quite common in the 1980s to use physical floppy disks and the postal service

Mail

Mail, or post, is a system for transporting letters and other tangible objects: written documents, typically enclosed in envelopes, and also small packages are delivered to destinations around the world. Anything sent through the postal system is called mail or post.In principle, a 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 his/her 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

Software cracking

Software cracking is the modification of software to remove or disable features which are considered undesirable by the person cracking the software, usually related to protection methods: copy protection, trial/demo version, serial number, hardware key, date checks, CD check or software annoyances...

groups as their primary channel of interaction. Software piracy via mail trading was also the most common means for many computer hobbyists in the Eastern bloc

Eastern bloc

The term Eastern Bloc or Communist Bloc refers to the former communist states of Eastern and Central Europe, generally the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact...

countries to receive new Western software for their computers.

Copy-protection schemes for the early systems were designed to defeat the casual pirate, as "crackers

Software cracking

" would typically release a pirated game to the pirate "community" the day they were earmarked for market.

A famous event in the history of software piracy policy was an open letter

Open Letter to Hobbyists

The Open Letter to Hobbyists was an open letter written by Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, to early personal computer hobbyists, in which Gates expresses dismay at the rampant copyright infringement taking place in the hobbyist community, particularly with regard to his company's...

written by Bill Gates

Bill Gates

William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...

of Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

, dated February 3, 1976, in which he argued that the quality of available software would increase if software piracy was less prevalent. However, until the early 1990s, software piracy was not yet considered a serious problem by most people. In 1992, the Software Publishers Association began to battle against software piracy, with its promotional video "Don't Copy That Floppy

Don't Copy That Floppy

Don’t Copy That Floppy was an anti-copyright infringement campaign run by the Software Publishers Association beginning in 1992. The video for the campaign, starring M. E. Hart as “MC Double Def DP,” was filmed at Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C...

". It and the Business Software Alliance

Business Software Alliance

The Business Software Alliance is a trade group established in 1988 and representing a number of the world's largest software makers and is a member of the International Intellectual Property Alliance...

have remained the most active anti-piracy organizations worldwide, although to compensate for extensive growth in recent years, they have gained the assistance of the Recording Industry Association of America

Recording Industry Association of America

The Recording Industry Association of America is a trade organization that represents the recording industry distributors in the United States...

(RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America

Motion Picture Association of America

The Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. , originally the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America , was founded in 1922 and is designed to advance the business interests of its members...

(MPAA), as well as American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers

American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers is an American not-for-profit performance-rights organization that protects its members' musical copyrights by monitoring public performances of their music, whether via a broadcast or live performance, and compensating them...

(ASCAP) and Broadcast Music Incorporated

Broadcast Music Incorporated

Broadcast Music, Inc. is one of three United States performing rights organizations, along with ASCAP and SESAC. It collects license fees on behalf of songwriters, composers, and music publishers and distributes them as royalties to those members whose works have been performed...

(BMI).

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 pirating, 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 his/her IP address

IP address

An Internet Protocol address is a numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing...

. They will then contact his/her ISP

Internet service provider

An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...

, and further legal action may be taken by the company/ISP.

Causes that have accelerated its growth

In the mid 1990s, computer

Computer

A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

s became more popular. This was largely attributed to Microsoft

Microsoft

and the release of Windows 95

Windows 95

Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products...

, which made using an IBM PC compatible

IBM PC compatible

IBM PC compatible computers are those generally similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones since they almost exactly duplicated all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by various manufacturers' ability to...

computer much easier for home users. Windows 95 became so popular that in developed countries nearly every middle-class household had at least one computer. Similar to television

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

s and telephone

Telephone

The telephone , colloquially referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that transmits and receives sounds, usually the human voice. Telephones are a point-to-point communication system whose most basic function is to allow two people separated by large distances to talk to each other...

s, computers became a necessity to every person in the information age

Information Age

The Information Age, also commonly known as the Computer Age or Digital Age, is an idea that the current age will be characterized by the ability of individuals to transfer information freely, and to have instant access to knowledge that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously...

. As the use of computers increased, so had software and cyber crimes

CyberCrime

CyberCrime was an innovative, weekly America television program on TechTV that focused on the dangers facing computer users. Filmed in San Francisco, California, the show was hosted by Alex Wellen and Jennifer London...

.

In the mid-1990s, the average Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

user was still on dial-up, with average speed ranging between 28.8 and 33.6 kbit/s. If one wished to download a piece of software, which could run about 200 MB

Megabyte

The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...

, the download time could be longer than one day, depending on network traffic, the Internet Service Provider

Internet service provider

, and the server. Around 1997, broadband

Broadband

The term broadband refers to a telecommunications signal or device of greater bandwidth, in some sense, than another standard or usual signal or device . Different criteria for "broad" have been applied in different contexts and at different times...

began to gain popularity due to its greatly increased network speeds. As "large-sized file transfer" problems became less severe, warez became more widespread and began to affect large software files like animation

Animation

Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...

s and movie

Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

s.

In the past, files were distributed by point-to-point technology: with a central uploader distributing files to downloaders. With these systems, a large number of downloaders for a popular file uses an increasingly larger amount of bandwidth

Bandwidth (computing)

In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth, network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits/second or multiples of it .Note that in textbooks on wireless communications, modem data transmission,...

. If there are too many downloads, the server can become unavailable. The opposite is true for peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...

networking; the more downloaders the faster the file distribution is. With swarming technology

Segmented downloading

Segmented downloading can be a more efficient way of downloading files from many peers at once. The one single file is downloaded, in parallel, from several distinct sources or uploaders of the file...

as implemented in file sharing

File sharing

systems like eDonkey2000

EDonkey2000

eDonkey2000 was a peer-to-peer file sharing application developed by US company MetaMachine, using the Multisource File Transfer Protocol...

or BitTorrent, downloaders help the uploader by picking up some of its uploading responsibilities. There are many sites with links to One-click hosting websites and other sites where one can upload files that contribute to the growing amount of warez.

Distribution via compromised FTP servers

Prior to the development of modern peer-to-peer sharing systems and home broadband service, sharing warez sometimes involved warez groups scanning the Internet for weakly secured computer systems with high-speed connections. These weakly secured systems would be compromised by exploiting the poor FTP security, creating a special directory on the server with an unassuming name to contain the illegal content.

A common mistake of early FTP administrators was to permit a directory named /incoming that allows full read and write access by external users, but the files themselves in /incoming were hidden. By creating a directory inside /incoming, this hidden directory would then allow normal file viewing. Users of the compromised site would be directed to login and go to a location such as /incoming/data/warez to find the warez content. Messages could be left for other warez users by uploading a plain text file with the message inside.

These hackers would also use known software bugs to illicitly gain full administrative remote control over a computer, and install a hidden FTP service to host their warez. This FTP service was usually running on an unusual port number, or with a non-anonymous login name like "login: warez / Password: warez" to help prevent discovery by legitimate users. Information about this compromised system would then be distributed to a select group of people who were part of the warez scene.

It was important for warez group members to regulate who had access to these compromised FTP servers, to keep the network bandwidth usage low. A site that suddenly became very popular would be noticed by the real owners of the equipment due to their business systems having become slow or low on disk space, resulting in an investigation of system usage which inevitably results in discovery and removal of the warez, and tightening of the site security.

Automated warez distribution via IRC robots

As the ability to compromise and attain full remote control of business servers became more developed, the warez groups would hack a server and install an IRC robot on the compromised systems alongside the FTP service, or the IRC robot would provide file sharing directly by itself. This software would intelligently regulate access to the illicit data by using file queues to limit bandwidth usage, or by only running during off-hours overnight when the business owning the compromised hardware was closed for the day.

In order to advertise the existence of the compromised site, the IRC software would join public IRC warez channels as a bot and post into the channel with occasional status messages every few minutes, providing information about how many people are logged in to the warez host, how many files are currently being downloaded, what the upload/download ratio is (to force users into contributing data of their own before they can download), which warez distributor is running the bot, and other status information.

Note that this functionality still exists and can still be found on IRC warez channels, as an alternative to the modern and streamlined P2P

Peer-to-peer

distribution systems. The opportunity to find and compromise poorly secured systems on which to create an illicit warez distribution site has only increased, with the popular use of broadband service by home users who may not fully understand the security implications of having their home computer always turned on and connected to the Internet.

Types of warez

There is generally a distinction made between different sub-types of warez. The unusual spellings shown here were commonly used as directory names within a compromised server, to organize the files rather than having them all thrown together in a single random collection.

0-day - This refers to any copyrighted work that has been released the same day as the original product, or sometimes even before. It is considered a mark of skill among warez distro groups to crack
Software cracking
Software cracking is the modification of software to remove or disable features which are considered undesirable by the person cracking the software, usually related to protection methods: copy protection, trial/demo version, serial number, hardware key, date checks, CD check or software annoyances...

and distribute a program on the same day of its commercial release.
Apps or Appz - Applications
Application software
Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...

: Generally a retail version of a software package.
Cracks or Crackz - Cracked applications
Software cracking
Software cracking is the modification of software to remove or disable features which are considered undesirable by the person cracking the software, usually related to protection methods: copy protection, trial/demo version, serial number, hardware key, date checks, CD check or software annoyances...

: A modified executable or more (usually one) and/or a library (usually one) or more and/or a patch designed to turn a trial version of a software package into the full version and/or bypass anti-piracy protections.
Dox - Computer game add-ons: These include nocds, cracks, trainers, cheat codes etc.
EBook (e-books) - Books: These include pirated eBooks, scanned books, scanned comics, etc.
Games - Games: This scene concentrates on both computer based games, and video game consoles, often released as ISO
ISO image
An ISO image is an archive file of an optical disc, composed of the data contents of every written sector of an optical disc, including the optical disc file system...

or other format disk image.
Keygens or Keygenz - Keygen
Keygen
A license or product key generator is a computer program that generates a product licensing key, serial number, or some other registration information necessary to activate for use a software application.-Software licensing:...

software are tools that replicate the registration/activation process of a genuine software product and generate the necessary keys to activate the software.
Movies - Movie
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

s: Pirated movies, can be released while still in theaters or from CDs/DVDs/Blu-ray prior to the actual retail date.
MP3s - MP3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

audio: Pirated albums, singles, or other audio format usually obtained by ripping a CD
Ripping
Ripping is the process of copying audio or video content to a hard disk, typically from removable media. The word is used to refer to all forms of media. Despite the name, neither the media nor the data is damaged after extraction....

or a radio broadcast
Radio music ripping
The term ripping can also apply to radio. New software, techniques and cloud services now makes it possible to extract the songs played on the radio and digitally save them on separate audio tracks...

and released in the compressed audio format MP3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

.
MVids (Music videos) - Can be ripped from TV, HDTV, DVDs or VCDs.
NoCD, NoDVD, FixedExe - A file modification that allows an installed program to be run without inserting the CD or DVD into the drive.
Portables
Portable application
A portable application , sometimes also called standalone, is a computer software program designed to run independently from an operating system...

- Similar to RIP. The point of portable software is the fact that it can be placed on removable media (or any place on the local hard drive) and doesn't need installing; usually it is compressed into one executable file, by using software like VMware ThinApp
VMware ThinApp
VMware ThinApp is an application virtualization and portable application creator suite by VMware that can package conventional applications so that they become portable applications...

or MoleBox.
RIP - A game that doesn't have to be installed
Portable application
A portable application , sometimes also called standalone, is a computer software program designed to run independently from an operating system...

; any required registry entry can be included as a .reg file. RIP games can be ripped of music and/or video files, or, for console games, ROMs, thus decreasing the size of the download. RIPs with nothing ripped out sometimes are referred to as DP (direct play).
Scripts - Scripts
Scripting language
A scripting language, script language, or extension language is a programming language that allows control of one or more applications. "Scripts" are distinct from the core code of the application, as they are usually written in a different language and are often created or at least modified by the...

: These include pirated commercial scripts (such as vBulletin, Invision Power Board, etc.) coded by companies in PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

, ASP
Active Server Pages
Active Server Pages , also known as Classic ASP or ASP Classic, was Microsoft's first server-side script engine for dynamically-generated Web pages. Initially released as an add-on to Internet Information Services via the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack Active Server Pages (ASP), also known as Classic...

, and other languages.
Subs - Subtitles: can be integrated in a TV-Rip or Movie.
Serials or Serialz - Refers to a collection of keys as serial numbers made available for the purpose of activating trial software, without payment.
Templates - Templates
Web template
A web template is a tool used to separate content from presentation in web design, and for mass-production of web documents. It is a basic component of a web template system.Web templates can be used to set up any type of website...

: These include pirated commercial website templates coded by companies.
TV-Rips - Television programs: Television shows or movies, usually with commercials edited out. Commonly released within a few hours after airing. DVD Rips of television series fall under this sub-type.

Movie piracy

Movie

Film

piracy

Copyright infringement is the unauthorized or prohibited use of works under copyright, infringing the copyright holder's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works.- "Piracy" :...

was looked upon as impossible by the major studios. When dial-up was common in early and mid 1990s, movies distributed on the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

tended to be small. The technique that was usually used to make them small was to use compression software, thus lowering the video quality significantly. At that time, the largest piracy threat was software.

However, along with the rise in broadband

Broadband

internet connections beginning around 1998, higher quality movies began to see widespread distribution – with the release of DeCSS

DeCSS

DeCSS is a computer program capable of decrypting content on a commercially produced DVD video disc. Before the release of DeCSS, there was no way for computers running a Linux-based operating system to play video DVDs....

, ISO

ISO 9660

ISO 9660, also referred to as CDFS by some hardware and software providers, is a file system standard published by the International Organization for Standardization for optical disc media....

images copied directly from the original DVDs were slowly becoming a feasible distribution method. Today, movie sharing has become so common that it has caused major concern amongst movie studios and their representative organizations. Because of this the MPAA is often running campaigns during movie trailers where it tries to discourage people from copying material without permission. Unlike the music industry, which has had online music stores available for several years, the movie industry only moved to online distribution in 2006, after the launch of Amazon Unbox

Amazon Unbox

Amazon Instant Video is an Internet video on demand service, only available in the United States, offered by Amazon.com which offers television shows and films for rental and purchase. The service became available on September 7, 2006 as Amazon Unbox...

File formats of warez

A CD

Compact Disc

The Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage , write-once audio and data storage , rewritable media , Video Compact Discs , Super Video Compact Discs ,...

software release can contain up to 700 megabyte

Megabyte

s of data, which presented challenges when sending over the Internet, particularly in the late 1990s when broadband was unavailable to most home consumers. These challenges apply to an even greater extent for a single-layer DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

release, which can contain up to 4.7 GB

Gigabyte

The gigabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage. The prefix giga means 109 in the International System of Units , therefore 1 gigabyte is...

of data. The warez scene made it standard practice to split releases up into many separate pieces, called disks, using several file compression formats: (historical TAR

Tar (file format)

In computing, tar is both a file format and the name of a program used to handle such files...

, LZH, ACE

ACE (file format)

In computing, ACE is a proprietary data compression archive file format developed by Marcel Lemke, and later bought by e-merge GmbH. The peak of its popularity was 1999—2001, when it provided slightly better compression rates than RAR, which has since become more popular.-WinAce:WinAce, maintained...

, UHA, ARJ

ARJ

ARJ is a software tool designed by Robert K. Jung for creating high-efficiency compressed file archives. ARJ is currently on version 2.85 for DOS and 3.15 for Windows and supports 16-bit and 32-bit Intel architectures.ARJ was one of two mainstream archivers for DOS and Windows during early and...

), ZIP

ZIP (file format)

Zip is a file format used for data compression and archiving. A zip file contains one or more files that have been compressed, to reduce file size, or stored as is...

, and most commonly RAR. The original purpose of these "disks" was so that each .rar file could fit on a single 1.44 MB 3½ inch floppy disk

Floppy disk

A floppy disk is a disk storage medium composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic carrier lined with fabric that removes dust particles...

. With the growing size of games, this is no longer feasible, as hundreds of disks would need to be used. The average size of disks released by groups today are 50 megabytes or 100 megabytes, however it is common to find disks up to 200 megabytes.

This method has many advantages over sending a single large file:

The two-layer compression could sometimes achieve almost a tenfold improvement over the original DVD/CD image. The overall file size is cut down and lessens the transfer time and bandwidth required.
If there is a problem during the file transfer and data was corrupted, it is only necessary to resend the few corrupted RAR files instead of resending the entire large file.
This method also allows the possibility of downloading separate ‘disks’ from different sources, as an early attempt at modern segmented downloading
Segmented downloading
Segmented downloading can be a more efficient way of downloading files from many peers at once. The one single file is downloaded, in parallel, from several distinct sources or uploaders of the file...

.
- In the case of One-click hosting websites downloading multiple files from one or several sources can significantly increase download speeds. This is because even if the source(s) provides slow download speeds on individual disks, downloading several disks simultaneously will allow the user to achieve much greater download rates.

With the rise of modern peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer

programs, which automatically break files up for partial downloads, compression via RAR, ZIP, and KGB is still commonplace but the breaking up of files is less so.

Releases of software titles often come in two forms. The full form is a full version of a game or application, generally released as CD or DVD-writable disk image

Disk image

A disk image is a single file or storage device containing the complete contents and structure representing a data storage medium or device, such as a hard drive, tape drive, floppy disk, CD/DVD/BD, or USB flash drive, although an image of an optical disc may be referred to as an optical disc image...

s (BIN

ISO image

An ISO image is an archive file of an optical disc, composed of the data contents of every written sector of an optical disc, including the optical disc file system...

or ISO files). A rip is a cut-down version of the title in which additions included on the legitimate DVD/CD (generally PDF

Portable Document Format

Portable Document Format is an open standard for document exchange. This file format, created by Adobe Systems in 1993, is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems....

manuals, help files, tutorials, and audio/video media) are omitted. In a game rip, generally all game video is removed, and the audio is compressed to MP3

MP3

MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

or Vorbis

Vorbis

Vorbis is a free software / open source project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation . The project produces an audio format specification and software implementation for lossy audio compression...

, which must then be decoded to its original form before playing. These rips are very rare today, as most modern broadband

Broadband

connections can easily handle the full files, and the audio is usually already compressed by the original producer in some fashion.

Motivations and arguments

There is a growing movement, exemplified by groups like The Pirate Party and scholars at the 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

Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence "Larry" Lessig is an American academic and political activist. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications, and he has called for state-based activism to promote substantive...

, who advocate for middle ground between freedom and intellectual property. For these people the argument is not about exploiting anything; it's about the freedom to control their own property such as their computers.

Software Pirates

generally exploit the international nature of the copyright

Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...

issue to avoid law enforcement in specific countries.

The production and/or distribution of warez is illegal in most countries. However, it is typically overlooked in poorer third world

Third World

The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either capitalism and NATO , or communism and the Soviet Union...

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.

Legality

Warez is often a form of copyright infringement

punishable as either a civil wrong

Tort

A tort, in common law jurisdictions, is a wrong that involves a breach of a civil duty owed to someone else. It is differentiated from a crime, which involves a breach of a duty owed to society in general...

or a crime

Criminal law

Criminal law, is the body of law that relates to crime. It might be defined as the body of rules that defines conduct that is not allowed because it is held to threaten, harm or endanger the safety and welfare of people, and that sets out the punishment to be imposed on people who do not obey...

. The laws and their application to warez activities may vary greatly from country to country. Generally, however, there are four elements of criminal copyright infringement: the existence of a valid copyright

Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...

, that copyright was infringed, the infringement was willful and the infringement was either for commercial gain or substantial (a level often set by statute

Statute

A statute is a formal written enactment of a legislative authority that governs a state, city, or county. Typically, statutes command or prohibit something, or declare policy. The word is often used to distinguish law made by legislative bodies from case law, decided by courts, and regulations...

). Often public sites such as pages hosting torrent files claim that they are not breaking any laws because they are not offering the actual data but link only to other places or peers that contain the infringing material.

In addition, nearly all Web providers do not permit the hosting of warez, and will delete any site found to be hosting them.

Depending on the country, in some cases, software piracy might become legal and encouraged. As a dispute between Iran

Iran

Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...

and USA over membership in WTO, and subsequent blocking of Iran's attempts at full-membership in the organization by the USA, has led Iran to encourage US software piracy. Subsequently, there has been a surge in Iranian "warez" and "crackz" websites, as unlike other countries, the Iranian laws do not forbid hosting them inside Iran. See: Iran and copyright issues

Iran and copyright issues

According to Circular 38a of the U.S. Copyright Office, Iran has no official copyright relations whatsoever with the United States.Published works originating in Iran thus are not copyrighted in the United States, regardless of the local copyright laws of these countries. See 17 U.S.C. § 104,...

Terminology

Piracy like all other words has different shades of meaning. Some denotative

Denotation (semiotics)

In semiotics, denotation is the surface or literal meaning encoded to a signifier, and the definition most likely to appear in a dictionary.-Discussion :Drawing from the original word or definition proposed by Saussure , a sign has two parts:...

, others connotative

Connotation (semiotics)

In semiotics, connotation arises when the denotative relationship between a signifier and its signified is inadequate to serve the needs of the community. A second level of meanings is termed connotative...

, some implying social acceptability, others pejorative. Whoever controls access to the discourse

Discourse

Discourse generally refers to "written or spoken communication". The following are three more specific definitions:...

is able to pick the words with meanings that frame

Framing (social sciences)

A frame in social theory consists of a schema of interpretation — that is, a collection of anecdotes and stereotypes—that individuals rely on to understand and respond to events. In simpler terms, people build a series of mental filters through biological and cultural influences. They use these...

the reader's response. 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[ing] use of or reproduc[ing] the work of another without authorization". Some groups (including the Free Software Foundation

Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software...

) object to the use of this and other words such as "theft" because they represent a partisan attempt to create a prejudice that is used to gain political ground. "Publishers often refer to prohibited copying as "piracy." In this way, they imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them" (FSF). The FSF advocate the use of terms like "prohibited copying" or "unauthorized copying", or "sharing information with your neighbor."

On the other hand, many self-proclaimed "software pirates" take pride in the term, thinking of the romanticized Hollywood portrayal of pirates and sometimes jokingly using pirate talk

International Talk Like a Pirate Day

International Talk Like a Pirate Day is a parodic holiday created in 1995 by John Baur and Mark Summers , of Albany, Oregon, U.S., who proclaimed September 19 each year as the day when everyone in the world should talk like a pirate...

in their conversations. Although the use of this term is controversial, it is embraced by some groups such as Pirates With Attitude

Pirates With Attitude

Pirates With Attitude was a major international warez release group between 1992 and 2000. The group was established by two former International Network of Crackers members known by the pseudonyms Orion and BarManager...

.

DDL Sites or Direct Download Sites are sites that index links to locations where files can be directly downloaded to the user's computer. Many such sites link to free file hosting service

File hosting service

A file hosting service, online file storage provider, or cyberlocker is an Internet hosting service specifically designed to host user files. Typically they allow HTTP and FTP access. Related services are content-displaying hosting services A file hosting service, online file storage provider, or...

s, for the hosting of materials. DDL sites do not directly host the material and can avoid the fees that normally accompany large file hosting.

Warez and malware

There is a common perception that warez sites represent high risk in terms of malware

Malware

Malware, short for malicious software, consists of programming that is designed to disrupt or deny operation, gather information that leads to loss of privacy or exploitation, or gain unauthorized access to system resources, or that otherwise exhibits abusive behavior...

. In addition, there are several papers showing there is indeed correlation between warez/pirate sites and malware

Malware

. In particular, one study shows that out of all domains the study classified as pirate, 7.1% are infected (while out of random domains only 0.4% were infected); another study maintains that '"maliciousness" of the content for sites they classified as pirate (which specifically included warez sites) is the highest among all the researched site categories.

External links

Piracy Textfiles – A historical collection of documents released by warez-related individuals.
Warez Trading and Criminal Copyright Infringement – An article on warez trading and the law, including a recap of US prosecutions under the No Electronic Theft Act.

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Etymology

Warez distribution

Rise of software piracy

Causes that have accelerated its growth

Distribution via compromised FTP servers

Automated warez distribution via IRC robots

Types of warez

Movie piracy

File formats of warez

Motivations and arguments

Legality

Terminology

Warez and malware

See also

External links