The politics of contraband--The honor economies of the
warez scene.
`This Trojan horse is a very low threat to Palm users who are sensible enough to avoid
warez mailing lists and do not download pirated software.
(147.) This figure is more than double the numbers of
warez sites from 1998.
However, if the cost of the software is not close to the consumer's reservation price--the willingness-to-pay--then the
warez vendor will get the sale.
(26.) See David McCandless,
Warez Wars, WIRED 175 (April 1997); Noah Robischon, Filching for Fun and Profit <http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/ editorial/0,1012,928,00.html> (last modified May 8,1997) (describing the use of drop sites for the exchange of pirated music).
This articulation happened on and around the cypherpunk mailing list where members developed the encryption tool Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) (Hoffman, 1995) and complained about
warez, a play on the term software used to describe early online file-sharing (Tetzlaff, 2000), and other matters related to cryptography.
The industry had blamed the burgeoning traffic in copyright-protected materials on Internet file-sharing networks and on so-called '
warez' trading sites for the recent upsurge in unlicensed software duplicates.
The investigations targeted groups that distributed "
warez" (pirated software) that was a major factor in an estimated $12 billion loss for software companies last year, according to research conducted for the Business Software Alliance.
15, 1999 <http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,32559,00.html> (describing the Recording Industry Association of America's civil action against a music software company for contributory copyright infringement);
Warez Chatters Busted: Piracy, WIRED NEWS, Nov.
So-called
warez groups, at first operating openly, were competing to "release" music first and offer the widest assortment.
The availability of so-called '
warez' sites, virtual trading posts where pirated software is made available free of charge to other Internet users, is also on the rise.