Warez (scene)

The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene, 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, 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.

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). 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. 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. 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. The groups would promote their abilities with ever more sophisticated and advanced software, graphical art, and later also music (demoscene).

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