Most people know about piracy in the digital age. They hear about it on television and from the world's news sources on an almost daily basis. Large organisations such as the MPAA and the RIAA bringing lawsuits against the consumers of entertainment for distributing copyrighted material through online avenues such as BitTorrent and other file sharing technologies. However not many people know the underground world known as The Scene that has been around since the 1970's and is the source of most pirated material. It is much more than a bunch of people out to make money though, in fact money is not a factor for those involved in The Scene directly. Most of the people involved profit from the kudos that comes from releasing a title long before it is released by the manufacturers. It is this driving force that has kept The Scene alive for over 30 years.

Sometime back in 1970 a number of BBS's (Bulletin Board Systems) sprung up mainly across America with a few also across Europe and Australia. These were places that the technically competent could meet up and talk about whatever interested them, usually technically related. A number of BBS's had storage space where some of the users would post copies of games for other users to download. Back then they were very primitive games and took up only a small amount of memory but as storage was limited only a few megabytes of space was available. Very soon after users started uploading applications as well as games to share with other members of the board. Over time the number of people using BBS's increased exponentially.

From early on The Scene was split into different factions. Some people were reverse engineers who specialised in removing copy protection from software, others created cracks and keygens (key generators) to bypass protection systems. Togather they would work together to make it possible for anyone to run a particular piece of software without having the necessary codes, keys, passwords required in the retail product. Other people would specialise in packing and distribution which entailed compressing the cracked software into as small a space as possible in order to maximise the amount of software that could be stored on a BBS and also to aid the speed of download. Remember this was back when modems were in use and speeds of 110 bits per second - compared to todays slowest connections which are 8388608 bits per second (or 8Mbit).

As The Scene grew a set of rules of conduct began to be formed. This was intended to make sure only those who posessed the highest skills could be included in this hidden world. BBS members started to form groups that consisted of a cracker, software engineer, distributor, packer and also artists prolific in ascii art - the art of creating pictures from keyboard characters. These groups would attach highly detailed ascii art to their software releases so that anyone downloading that particular copy would know who had cracked, packed and released it. Competition between groups started to appear with small messages within the artwork bragging of the group's latest accomplishment and also slandering rival group's at the same time. Consumers of these releases would start collecting all the releases from particular groups whether they wanted the title or not, just to complete the collection of that particular group's work and thus The Scene was born...

As more and more groups surfaced a set of rules started to become clear. These rules were intended to make it easier to download a release and also ensure that the quality of the release was known before the user started the hefty download. In the early days of the internet bandwidth was extremely limited so a piece of software would be first compacted to ensure it took up as small a space as possible, then it would be split into a number of small parts. The idea was that if you were downloading a large file and your connection to the internet cut off then you would have to start downloading that file all over again however if the file was split into smaller chunks, then if your connection dropped halfway through you would only need to continue where the download had last finished meaning you would not have to download the whole thing again. Once all the parts were down you would then use a command to join all the seperate files back into one compressed file and then decompress the file in order to use it. These same practises still exist today, even though bandwidth has increased exponentially so too have the size of files ensuring the practise of compacting and splitting files continues.

Competition between groups became rife and they started employing the tallents of artists, particularly ascii artists. When they released a new piece of software they would create a small introduction screen known as a cracktro or intro. This would typically include a static ascii art screen with the logo of the group, the names of the members of the group, code names of course. These intro screens would develop into fully blown demo's eventually which are short graphical sequences with technically difficult 3D objects floating around the screen to a thumping soundtrack and scrolling text which greeted fellow release groups and slandering opposing groups.

The scene was developing fast. From it's humble beginnings on BBS's it was now spreading and getting a cult like following. There can't be many teenagers of the 80's who can not recall the names of some of the release groups of the day. Groups such as The Medway Boys, WAS (NOT WAS), Pompey Pirates, Fairlight (still in operation to this day), Razor 1911 and this list goes on with many people downloading the titles just to complete their collections rather than actually wanting the title. The intros and demos attached to the start of the software were becoming more and more elaborate and some groups then started to not only crack the software and add a demo but also improve the software by hacking into the code and repairing bugs or annoyances within the software itself. The madness of this meant that pirated software was sometimes better quality than the original product putting a stop to all the claims that pirated goods are usually shoddy and less than their original counterparts.

As bandwidth increased so did the variation of what was on offer. Starting off with small basic games and software application The Scene moved into more modern games, music, films and more recently digital books. Further rules were built to ensure quality could be recognised without actually downloading a whole movie to find out. The use of .nfo files was employed. .nfo files are small text files that contain some ascii art of the groups logo at the top of the document followed by technical information of the release. This information can be the title, date of release and also the resolution (for example if it is standard or high definition, what format the movie is in (will it play on your DVD player, ipod or just on your PC), sound quality information, is it DTS, THX etc. the idea is that you first download the small text .nfo file and see if the release meets your requirements before going to the trouble of downloading. Creating .nfo files to go with your release is seen as good practice within The Scene and most legitimate release groups stick to this. Having an .nfo file alone though is not necessarily a sign of good adherance to the rules. It's important when encoding movies and music to stick to standards, certain aspect ratios, filters and techniques to blur out time codes from leaked movies have to be applied correctly so releasing a movie that is either out of synch with the sound, or the wrong aspect ratio will get the group an inferno of flaming and backlash from the rest of the release community and could be their undoing should they keep repeating the mistakes. The upside of all these rules and their reason for being is to make sure the people who download these titles get the very best quality that can be offered.

(to be continued...)