Warez scene
- For the 70's British Mod Revival band see The Scene, for the Canadian band, see The Scene (band). For other meanings, see Scene (disambiguation).
The Scene is a term used to refer to a collection of communities of pirate networks that obtain and copy new movies, music, and games, often before their public release, and illegally distribute them throughout the Internet (and previously through BBSes). Each specific subsection within The Scene has its own community and rules governing releases, and are made up of many smaller groups. These communities are referred to as scenes as well, for example the MP3 Scene, the DVDR Scene, etc. Groups gather in private and IRC chat rooms where they can easily coordinate with other members to "pre" and distribute releases.
Distribution
Members involved in the scene are generally well-organized in their behavior and usually very paranoid about their anonymity. They maintain a private network of top-level FTP sites ("topsites") that get the new releases first, from where they are distributed to smaller and smaller sites. Members whose job it is to upload and transfer these releases are called couriers and usually obtain "credits" to download or transfer files in a certain ratio (e.g. 1:3, in this case allowing them to download three times as much as they upload). Releases containing problems (for example, poor quality, duplicates, etc.) are "nuked" -- where essentially a permanent mark is placed on a release and the user/group responsible for putting the files on the site loses credits.
Subsections of The Scene
Beginning in the mid 1990s, the MP3 scene was formed. This scene was one of the first incarnations of the scene as it is known today. By 1999, the original groups implemented a set of strict rules about the way releases were ripped, packaged and released. Releases were required to come from a CDDA source, be encoded at 128 kbit/s, have proper filenames and directory structure, and include a playlist, a SFV file and a NFO file. In recent years this rule has been ammended, stipulating that all mp3 files must be encoded at 192 kbit/s using a variable bitrate.
During the 1980s what is now known as the demoscene began to branch off from "the scene". Sometime in the late 1990s there was also the branching off of the abandonware scene.
See also
External links
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