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A Corporate Security Guide To Software Piracy
By Josh
Almost from the first computer commercially sold, pirates have flourished. The international trade in pirated mirrors criminal activities of other kinds such as drug trafficking - it has its own subculture, jargon, and connections.
It is important to distinguish between stolen and free or open source software. In fact, the vast majority of available even today is:
* open source - the source code is available and the is released under public use for learning, modification, and even redistribution.
* freeware - written by students and hobbyists and given away for free without source code.
* free - free as in "freedom", open source under the GNU public license.
* shareware - given away as a sample with the option to pay a small fee to get the full version.
* demoware - given away as a free sample of a commercial product.
* charityware - like freeware or shareware, but the user is urged to donate to a charity as "payment" if they feel motivated to.
"Pirated software", as opposed to the above categories, is produced by a commercial company and sold to the public under a restrictive proprietary license, which has then had its copy-protection cracked and is now being illegally resold or traded.
Originally, there was no such thing as piracy, because programs to run on computers were simply seen as a non-income commodity. All was free and open, with computer labs, government contractors, and college students all freely writing and sharing software. then the idea that could be sold for money took hold, as computers matured and showed up on the home market. Many in the computing community took offense to this notion, and so there is an undercurrent of resentment and justification felt even today, along with the pure profit motive.
The original pirates were the "Warez Kids". These were hobbyist home computer owners who put up bulletin board systems, abbreviated to "BBS"s, for the purpose of posting free copies of cracked titles online. The "free" part actually means that you have to upload some of your own cracked before downloading the BBS-hosted supply, and thus this was termed a 'ratio' site, where typically you'd have to upload two programs for every one you downloaded.
The "Warez" name comes from a deliberate misspelling of "wares", for software, and the "cute" misspelling of words is a distinct marker of the culture. Thus, at the same site where you obtain "warez", you might also get "filez" (illicit copies of private documents, manuals, and such), "codez" (cheat codes for cracking software), "serialz" (serial numbers which unlock for paid use), "numberz" (stolen credit card numbers on the side), "Pr0n" (for pornographic media) and so on. The creative typing gets much more elaborate, with permutations such as
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