Windows 7: Warez

Windows 7 will be released on October 22, 2009.

Soon after that happens, it will probably be distributed as Warez on the internet.

Warez refers primarily to copyrighted material traded in violation of copyright law. The term generally refers to illegal releases by organized groups, as opposed to peer-to-peer file sharing between friends or large groups of people with similar interest using a Darknet.

It usually does not refer to commercial for-profit software counterfeiting. This term was initially coined by members of the various computer underground circles, but has since become commonplace among Internet users and the media.

The term "Piracy" is used in this article to refer "unauthorized use of intellectual property", where "unauthorized" refers to a lack of authority granted by the holder of the intellectual property and the use is within the jurisdiction of the legal authority under which a property right requiring such authorization for use is established.

The word "Warez" was coined to indicate more than one piece of pirated software, as "software" is a non-count noun and users found it natural to use a count noun to differentiate between one "ware" (one piece of software [one program]) and multiple "Warez" (multiple pieces of software [multiple programs]).

Due to the relatively large amounts of time needed to transfer large files over slow telephone modems and bulletin board systems (BBSes), pirates would typically ask for one-for-one trades from other pirates. Hence, software pirates adopted a merchant-like attitude with their software collection(s) and the term "wares" was apt.

Warez is used most commonly as a noun: "My neighbor downloaded 10 gigabytes of Warez yesterday"; but can also be used as a verb: "The new Windows was warezed a month before the company officially released it". The collection of Warez groups is referred to globally as the "Warez scene" or more ambiguously "The Scene".

Piracy in its current form began during the industrial revolution in the 19th century. Industrial textile production was one of the important factors in economic growth. Plans for weaving machines were patented and the British government applied strict restrictions on exports of the technology.

At the time, patent law in the United States limited all patents to US citizens only and, protected by this act, several businessmen such as Francis Cabot Lowell began manufacturing without paying any compensation to the patent holders in Britain. Francis Cabot Lowell's mill was based on technology patented by Edmund Cartwright. Such acts were condoned by the US government for over a century until the passing of the International Copyright Act.

During the 1980s, and continuing into the 2000s, some 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 Eastern or Asian countries such as China, Thailand, 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 the Pacific Mall in suburban Toronto. Unlike Asian countries where pirate goods can even be sold in retailers, this kind of distribution is rare in Western nations.

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 sprang 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.

It was also quite common in the 1980s to use physical floppy disks and the postal service for spreading software, in an activity known as mail trading. Particularly widespread in continental Europe, mail trading was even used by many of the leading cracker groups as their primary channel of interaction. Software piracy via mail trading was also the most relevant means for many computer hobbyists in the Eastern bloc countries to receive new Western software for their computers.

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.

A famous event in the history of software piracy policy was an open letter written by Bill Gates of Microsoft, dated February 3, 1976, in which he argued that the quality of available software would increase if software piracy was less prevalent. However, until the early 1990s, software piracy was not yet considered a serious problem by most people. 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).

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 middle-class household had at least one computer[citation needed]. 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.

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 becoming possible in early 1999 with the advent of V.90). 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.

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 file sharing systems like eDonkey2000, downloaders help the uploader by picking up some of its uploading responsibilities.

BitTorrent brings a new way of how peers share their files. When one downloads files, one is not only a downloader, but also an uploader. Up to a point, the more downloaders there are, the faster the file distribution becomes.

There is generally a distinction made between different sub-types of Warez:

appz - Applications: Generally a retail version of a software package.
crackz - Cracked applications: A modified executable or more (usually one) and/or a library (usually one) or more and/or a patch designed to turn a trial version of a software package into the full version and/or bypass anti-piracy protections.
gamez - Games: This scene concentrates on both computer based games, and video game consoles, though the latter are more often referred to as ISOs and ROMs.
moviez - Movies: Pirated movies generally released while still in theaters or from CDs/DVDs/HD-DVDs prior to the actual retail date.
nocd/no cd/nodvd/no dvd - A file modification that allows an installed program to be run without inserting the CD or DVD into the drive.
tvripz - Television programs: Television shows generally released within a few hours after airing, with all commercials edited out. DVD Rips of television series fall under this sub-type.
mp3z - MP3 audio: Pirated albums, singles, or other audio format usually obtained by ripping a CD or a radio broadcast and released in the compressed MP3 audio format.
bookz/ebooks/e-books - Books: These include pirated eBooks, scanned books, scanned comics, cartoons etc.
scriptz - Scripts: These include pirated scripts coded by companies in PHP, ASP, and other languages.
templatez - Templates: These include pirated website templates coded by companies.
dox - Computer game add-ons: These include nocds, cracks, trainers, cheat codes etc.
0-day Warez (pronounced as zero day Warez) - This refers to a crack which has been released on the same day as the original.

*from Windows Vista Update*