The Scene

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 channels where they can easily coordinate with other members to "pre" and distribute releases.

1 History
2 Subsections of The Scene
3 Distribution
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] History

The Scene started emerging in 1980s on privately run BBS systems. The first BBSes were located in the USA, but similar boards started appearing in Australia and Europe. The BBSes advertised their dial-in numbers openly in group nfo's or semi-hidden, so that anyone interested had to use a war dialer to actually find the real number of the BBS box. The BBS systems typically hosted several megabytes of material. The best boards had multiple phone lines and up to hundred megabytes of storage space, which was very expensive at the time. Releases were mostly games and later 'utils' (applications), once 386 systems started to emerge and take over the standard as PC system. The Scene didn't work with a fixed ruleset, they just assumed that end-users would know what they were getting either based on the release name or nfo. Talented coders who cracked games often included 4 or 64 kilobytes long cracktro to express their skills as a coder, artist or a musican.

The demoscene grew especially strong in Scandinavia, where annual gatherings are hosted even today. Warez distribution played only a minor role during the modem/BBS era since the transfer speeds were extremely slow. It would've taken several hours to transfer complete game from host to another even with the fastest modems available. The Scene was limited, secure and worked on an invite-only basis. For this reason, some older scenesters often long for the "good old days."

[edit] 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 had 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 amended, allowing the source to be from DVD (including DVD-A) or VHS, live recording, vinyl, or tape, and stipulating that all mp3 files must be encoded at a variable bitrate (most groups use a LAME preset to achieve this). In 2004, a rule was added that all non-retail releases be tagged as bootleg.

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. Today, PC gaming groups such as RELOADED, DEViANCE and recently Razor 1911 still place what sometimes look like Commodore 64 cracktros alongside their cracks on the ISOs. Unlike the original cracktros, these are separate executables and do not run with the cracked executables.

[edit] 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 there 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.