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Warez - History of warez

Warez - History of warez: Encyclopedia II - Warez - History of warez

Warez - Product piracy. Before there were computers and software, piracy existed; At the time, piracy was usually, though not always, profit-oriented. During the 1980s, one of the most famous products targeted were Lacoste shirts. This type of product counterfeiting was and still is done by organized crime groups often based in countries like China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Russia. These groups illegally produce millions of counterfeit copies of clothing, electronics, microchips, music CDs, VHS &a ...

Warez: Encyclopedia II - Warez - History of warez

Warez - History of warez

Warez - Product piracy

Before there were computers and software, piracy existed; At the time, piracy was usually, though not always, profit-oriented. During the 1980s, one of the most famous products targeted were Lacoste shirts. This type of product counterfeiting was and still is done by organized crime groups often based in countries like China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Russia. These groups illegally produce millions of counterfeit copies of clothing, electronics, microchips, music CDs, VHS & DVD movies, and software applications.

While most copies of pirate software are manufactured in Asian factories, their distribution often begins in first-world nations such as the United States and Western Europe, where the largest international publishers of proprietary software are located. These pirate copies are regularly sold on city streets throughout most of South America, Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In some countries they are sold at retail price which can be worth several billion dollars annually. While the selling of pirate copies is less common in Western nations, its popularity is growing. In Western nations, pirate products are usually sold in specific areas, such as Chinatown in New York and Pacific Mall in suburban Toronto. Unlike Asian countries where pirate goods can be even sold in retailers, this kind of distribution is rare in Western nations.

Warez - Rise of software piracy

Software piracy has been an issue from the day the first commercial software program hit store shelves. Whether the medium was cassette tape or floppy disk, software pirates found a way to duplicate the software and spread it amongst their friends. Thriving pirate communities were built around the Apple II, Commodore 64, the Atari 400 and Atari 800 line, the ZX Spectrum, the Amiga, the Atari ST among other personal computers. Entire networks of BBSes sprung up to traffic illegal software from one user to the next. Machines like the Amiga and the Commodore 64 had an international pirate network; software not available on one continent would eventually make its way to every region through the pirate network via the bulletin board systems. Copy protection schemes for the early systems were designed to defeat the casual pirate, as "crackers" would typically release a pirated game to the pirate "community" the day they were earmarked for market.

However, until the early 1990s, software piracy was not yet considered a serious problem. In 1992, the Software Publishers Association began to battle against software piracy, with its promotional video "Don't Copy That Floppy". It and the Business Software 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 (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), as well as American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI).

These are some causes which have accelerated its growth:

In the late 1990s, computers became more popular. This was attributed to Microsoft and the release of Windows 95, which greatly decreased the learning curve for using a computer. Windows 95 became so popular that in developed countries nearly every household has at least one computer. Similar to televisions and telephones, computers became a necessity to every person in the information age. As the use of computers increased, so had software and cyber crimes. The problem of warez became so serious that it had adversely affected software writers and companies.

In the mid-1990s, the average Internet user was still on dial-up, with average speed ranging between 28.8 and 33.6 kbit/s (with a maximum speed of 56 kbit/s). If one wished to download a piece of software, which could run about 20 MB, the download time could be longer than one day, depending on network traffic, the Internet Service Provider, and the server. Around 1997, broadband 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 animations and movies. The next generation of networking is optical fiber network, whose speed can reach up to 1.6 Tb/s in field deployed systems and up to 10 Tb/s in lab systems, with this seemingly unlimited bandwidth it is virtually impossible to imagine a limit as to what could be pirated.

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. If there are too many downloads, the server can become unavailable. The same is true for peer-to-peer networking; the more downloaders the slower the file distribution is. With swarming technology as implemented in eDonkey2000 and BitTorrent file sharing systems, downloaders help the uploader by picking up some of its uploading responsibilities. When one downloads files, one is not only a downloader, but also an uploader. To a point, the more downloaders there are, the faster the file distribution becomes.