The Pirate Book

WAREZ GLOSSARY 1. SUPPLIERS Member of a warez group who obtains a legitimate copy of the content to be released; methods of obtaining files include copying from producers, hacking into corporate networks, videotaping movies, and retail purchasing.

2. CRACKERS Member of a warez group who removes copyright protection from content in preparation for release to the warez scene and P2P networks. Every application and game on the market contains some type of copy protection. Despite all the time and money invested in copy protection techniques, crackers can still defeat the most elaborate and complex copy protection technology, often hours before it is placed on a store shelf. It is a mental competition: software developers create a lock and crackers digitally pick it as fast as possible.

3. PACKERS When a release’s dupe status is cleared and a title is ready to be released, the product must be packed into scene-compliant volumes. Many groups have dedicated packers who pack releases night and day. Packers act as living tools for release coordinators, informing them when a new release needs to be packed and uploaded. It takes only minutes for an experienced packer to pack a large release and then upload it to a private group site, ready for the next stage.

4. PRE’ING The stage in which the release is uploaded to a groupʼs affiliated sites and released. Group-affiliated sites want a group’s release to be uploaded first; therefore, many sites insist on groups using internal prescripts.

5. TOP SITE Underground, highly secretive, high-speed FTP servers used by release groups and couriers for distribution, storage and archiving of warez releases.

Topsites have very high-bandwidth Internet connections, commonly supporting transfer speeds of hundreds to thousands of megabits per second, enough to transfer a full Blu-ray in seconds. Topsites also have very high storage capacity; a total of many terabytes is typical.

6. COURIERS Member of a warez group who distributes pirated content between top-level warez servers. They are the worker ants of the scene, carrying releases from site to site, ensuring that each release is spread from the top-sites down to the smallest sites.

7. SITES Scene sites are impressive, secure data warehouses that are used for piracy.

Each release group must be affiliated with several decent sites if they intend to release anything.

8. SEEDER A client that has a complete copy of the data of a certain torrent. Once your BitTorrent client finishes downloading, it will remain open until you click the finish button. This is known as being a seed or seeding.