The SceneThe scene aka the warez scene is the pretty unknown worldwide network where people trade pirated goods, like dvd’s, movies, games, applications etc. Warez refers primarily to copyrighted material traded in violation of its copyright license. It does not refer to commercial for-profit software counterfeiting. First warez is released by releasegroups, groups which are specialized in publishing warez. They copy a dvd or break the security of game, and will make it available for other people, as a so-called release. When these releasegroups finish a release it will be uploaded to sites. These sites are very fast private ftp-servers, and the first stadium in the distribution of a release. Eventually, at the end of the distribution, the releases are available for everyone on p2p-software.
The speed of this worldwide network is enormous. Within minutes a release can be copied to hundreds of other sites. Within an hour, it’s available on thousands of sites and fxp boards.
Within a day or two it’s available on newsgroups, irc and in the end, on p2p-software. It’s not all one big happy family. The warez scene consists of certain groups/layers. At the top we have the releasegroups and the topsites. These groups are the scene core. The other groups officially are not a part of the scene. Though most people consist them as a part of the scene. Read more about the scene hierarchy here..
The scene isn’t just a distribution network, it’s far more than that. There are the scene rules which are there to guarantee good quality releases. If not, a release will be nuked. This means it will be marked as bad. Nuked releases are not spread well and the releasegroup will get a bad status. More about how the scene works, and the scene system, click here.
Security is an important issue in the scene. Since their activities are illegal the sceners have to secure themselves, to be safe from the anti-piracy organisations (such as the feds, national anti-piracy organisations, etc) and avoid being caught in a takedown.