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This book has detailed the operations, the artforms, the sociality, the technical infrastructures, and the legality of the underground, computer subculture known as the Warez Scene. Distinct from other levels of piracy, such as the popular, public Bittorrent communities, this highly organized and efficient digital, criminal underworld is characterized by its sophistication, logistical savvy, and relative lack of mainstream prominence. Emerging from the computer art DemoScene of the early 1990s, the Scene has shown itself to be resilient to legal attack, professional in its security and organization, and well resourced in its operation.
The Scene is a highly organized space specializing in the release of software, movies, music, pornography, and other media forms before the official release dates of these items for sale. Growing from the DemoScene in the 1990s and sharing a common core of skilled ability to disassemble and crack software, the Scene is a sophisticated operation that involves suppliers, crackers, groups, testers, leaders, sites, site operators, IRC networks, bot suppliers, FTPD coders, prebots, bouncers, ASCII artists, demo programmers, musicians, artists, couriers, autotraders, nukers, NukeNets, quotas, rules and standards, charts, codes of conduct, loyalties, betrayals, infiltrations, takedowns, court cases, public news commentary, private information channels, rumors, hacking and cracking, hardware supplies, humor, homophobia, racism, bragging, cheating, stealing, mystique, and drudgery. It is a mythical space in its secrecy yet one that continually must rear its head in public to receive the legitimation and adulation that its members desire. The Scene is an elaborate performance of elitism, played in private, yet one that requires a public stage on which to act out its status. While some Scene members undoubtedly do manage to keep their heads down and work forever in the shadows, the lure for others is always too great, a fact evidenced in how Scene releases end up on public torrent sites and in other venues outside of their own formal structures.
Core to the argument of this book has been the contention that the Warez Scene is less about piracy itself and access to the end artifacts of that process than it is about a high-stakes alternative reality game of elitism and competition. Despite allegations that pirates might be communists or socialists who believe in the free sharing of anything for anyone, the truth of the matter is that, structurally, the Scene is a highly competitive and economic space that thrives on scarcity. There are very few top slots on topsites, fought over by many competitors. The Scene has an elaborate ruleset for its game that is structurally enforced by the presence of NukeNets and local nukers, by release rule standards, and by an honor code and the notion of a lifelong SceneBan. Far from an equitable space in which all players are equal, the Scene more accurately resembles an extreme, laissezfaire, capitalist marketplace, in which intra-agent competition and inequality represent the core conditions.[^1] While there is no over-arching authority that enforces these market circumstances as we might see in historical Ordo-liberal economic regimes, the accrued authority of top Sceners make de facto pronouncements the core operational principles and, by default, set a series of rules in place.
The Warez Scene is nonetheless difficult to research. Other books, such as Paul Craig’s Software Piracy Exposed, use a range of interview techniques, conscripting Sceners who were willing to speak and provide anecdotes on condition of anonymity. In this work, I have adopted a different approach. While it is possible to garner background information on the Scene and its operation from secondary academic sources, my approach has been to seek out original documentary artifacts from the Scene and to infer its operations from these archival objects. This is possible due to the DeFacto2 archive, among other sources, which hoards a wealth of NFO files, DemoScene executables, and other Scene documents.
However, the very existence of these artifacts points to a core contention of this book: the Warez Scene should also be considered an aesthetic subculture. A type of “geek community,” topsites are styled and have their own advertorial NFO files — release groups, likewise. Hence, the entire Scene is structured on a delicate balance between showcasing one’s activities and seeking to remain hidden. It is a world in which show-off egotists and narcissists seek constant validation through the circulation of credit and respect but also one in which the entire subculture must remain hidden for legal reasons. While Sceners prize reputation within the Scene, it is clearly not enough, and the fame of conducting covert interviews with piracy news sites, such as TorrentFreak, proves too tempting for many. It is thanks to these artifacts that document and advertise the efforts of the Scene that this book was possible. The subculture of the Warez Scene cannot bear to keep itself dull or quiet, and it is the presence of these aesthetic objects that leads to information leakage.
The aesthetic subculture of the players in the Warez Scene works similarly to many other geek communities, though with some key differences. While the DemoScene group, Fairlight, met in person legally once, most Sceners will never know one another’s identities. There are some exceptions to this; on occasion, the supply of artifacts will require the transfer of physical media between parties within a release group, which leads to potential points of compromise. Again, it takes only one slip of identity and address for such information to become near permanently incriminating for participants.
For this reason, most Sceners appear to do a good job of keeping their identities unknown, existing only under the aliases of their pseudonymous online personae. Nonetheless, for many Sceners, this underground culture is their main life identity. It is more than just a way to acquire content. As TorrentFreak put it: the Scene is “a stress headache that most pirates can do without,” and it is not wholly clear why people would participate if the goal were simply to acquire pirate media.[^2] While it is true that “many people aspire to become a ‘member’” of the Scene to hope “to bathe in the collective mystery, kudos and notoriety,” the volume of effort that is invested is not commensurate to the access that is gained or provided.[^3] Instead, as this article continues, “if people really must obtain all the latest movies and TV shows for free, doing it quietly via torrent sites seems much, much less stressful than getting tightly involved in The Scene or anyone close to it. Indeed, The Scene seems more of a complex lifestyle choice than a hobby for many participants, but one that could implode at any second.”[^4] The Scene is not just a sideshow way to obtain content. It is an entire social structure, or an alternative reality game, that seems to become the dominant model of life activity for many participants. While it is easy to deride such geek or nerd cultures for the unusual form of social contact they represent — and the Scene is weirder than most with its level of illegality — it is a mistake to underestimate the sociality of this space.
In this respect, law enforcement often misunderstands the Scene. Although the law is correct, in one sense, in viewing it as a criminal cartel intent on multimedia piracy on a broader scale, even if not with a broader userbase, than any other operation, simply punishing Sceners as such has unilaterally failed to stem the flow of releases. Instead, legal efforts thus far have played a game of whack-a-mole with topsites and release groups, steadily infiltrating them only to cut off a single head before the whole thing starts up again. Certainly, this approach does act as a deterrent for some Scene members. Retirements do seem to be announced in the wake of busts. However, law enforcement efforts have generally been unsuccessful at stopping the Scene en masse. This is probably partially because less effort is invested in curbing the Warez Scene when it constitutes such a small slice of the general piracy pie, even if it makes up a core supply route for downstream activities. But the agencies tasked with shutting down the Scene are simply not as well resourced as they would need to be to stem the tide. The Scene is also, to mix metaphors, a keystone to the bridge of the entire pirate distribution network. Removing the Scene causes many other public elements to collapse, and anti-piracy efforts need to do what they can to stop the linchpin work of the Scene. Nonetheless, legal efforts remain more tightly focused on the mass-scale piracy in public, such as The Pirate Bay and its ilk. Given that these too have had limited success, it seems unlikely that mass-scale legal action against the Scene is likely to win soon.
Another indication of how the Scene is more than an outfit based on access to pirate material, and is more akin to a lifestyle subculture or all-engrossing, alternative reality game, is the development of specific language vocabularies and humor among participants. For example, the well-known phenomenon of l33t-speak or “leetspeak” sits in ambiguous tension among Sceners. While this language is used and members need a working knowledge of its linguistic codes, it is also true that leetspeak is deployed ironically in many cases. The insider linguistic codes that developed in these computer subcultures are also seen as somewhat regressively childish, which is unsurprising given that most Sceners appear to be on the cusp of middle age. Hence, uncritical blasts of leetspeak are not likely to gain much kudos, but a knowing irony pervades many of the Scene documents in the DeFacto2 archive.Scene humor possesses an ironic quality but also relies on extreme levels of insider know-how. While the level of actual amusement such material can generate is debatable, this is not its purpose. Such humor functions as another demarcation of insider and outsider status. The role here is not to make people laugh but to allow Sceners to congratulate themselves on getting the joke, even if it is not funny. When “quotes of the week” feature either named or anonymized individuals, the Scener who can say that they “saw the original” or who can reveal to others the hidden identity in anonymized cases performs the possession of an esoteric knowledge, demonstrating further elitism. Part of playing the alternative reality game of the Scene lies in social networking.
However, the naming of individuals in quotes of the week for humorous purposes is the perfect example of risk-taking behavior in the Scene. Of course, a truly professionalized criminal network would hardly flaunt the identifiable, online nicknames in documents that, although private, inevitably find their way into unintended hands. Nevertheless, this desire to perform in semi-public is an instance of how the Scene functions as an aesthetic subculture, and not, despite its extensive security precautions, a purely criminal endeavor.
There is some debate as to whether the Scene will continue in all its forms. The MP3 and then FLAC Scenes that emerged to distribute music have in many ways been eclipsed by the success of Oink’s Pink Palace, What.CD, and other current and private, Bittorrent trackers. Arguably, these torrent sites can achieve greater total coverage of all music media than was ever accomplished by the Scene. On the other hand, none of these systems have survived as long as the Warez Scene. Lasting just a few years in each case, these sites have also only gained near-comprehensive coverage by having a userbase that is permeable, if not open. In turn, this presents a far larger attack surface for law enforcement. In other words, compared to the security precautions of the Scene, private Bittorrent trackers are significantly less safe and a great deal more centralized while requiring broader access. All three features contribute to better coverage of the pirate media that these systems contain, but they also make it exponentially more likely that such sites will be shut down.
The Scene must strike a delicate balance between openness to meritocracy and working with known individuals who can be trusted. The more raids that are conducted upon the Scene, the more the upper hierarchies will close down to admit only those with a proven track record of safety. This leads to negative consequences from the Scene’s perspective. Without fresh supply routes and new coding talent, the release supply chain quickly dries up. This is why it is interesting that there is a pecking order of release groups. While younger, less experienced, and less prestigious release groups often advertise a contact method in their NFO for new prospective members to get in touch, these are not present among the higher echelons. Instead, these groups tend to prefer to watch and wait. When new members of the Scene have proven themselves among the lower release groups, they may be invited to the more prestigious ranks. In other words, there is a process — almost akin to Artists and Repertoire (A&R) recruiting in the music industry — by which new members are audited and judged. This keeps the top tier of the Scene relatively safe from most busts, even while it exposes those further down the food chain.
One of the problems with breaking up the Scene is that there is no equivalent online social structure from which ex-members can get their adrenaline fix. Other communities that focus on hoarding and accumulating, or even just collecting, have also been destroyed in the wake of the internet. As we reach an era in which the world of, for example, crate digging for rare records has been outshone by the comprehensive databases of Discogs and other online retailers, it is ever harder for those with prestige addiction to find an outlet for their love of competition and scarcity.
As a final conclusion, the Warez Scene, which continues to this day, is a major, underground alternative reality game. A secret computer aesthetic subculture, it is a significant but overlooked player in the contemporary digital world. This book has hoped to shed some light on its practices and mechanisms.
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