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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.

Have you seen an awful commercial that started playing up in 2004 (Ontario, Canada) on Rogers Cable. It starts out with 10 year old boy walking out of a convenience store with a candy bar, and the shop owner runs out and accuses him of shoplifting it. The scene then jumps to a cops dropping the kid off at his parents house. Than the scene jumps again to inside the house, the kid is sitting on the couch with his father next to him. The father asks, "Did your friends put you up to it?" The kid shakes his head. "Then where did you learn to steal?" The kid looks up at his father with big deer in front of headlights eyes and says, "But Dad, you steal satellite tv signals!"

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It then cuts to a white screen with the words "theft is theft" written on it in large black courier font with the sound of sirens and police radio in the background. The funny thing is that the commercial make some people want to "steal satellite signals" just so they know their money wouldn't be going to fund such dreck. So, apparently the progression is: P2P leads to Warez. Warez leads to Satellite Hacking. Satellite Hacking leads to Shoplifting, and so on and so on.

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Satellite Piracy Paradise Island, Bahamas: In a Holiday Inn, I sit watching the ocean, listening to the air conditioning, waiting for the phone to ring. I'm here to make a connection, to meet a figure from the information underground. He's been described by one law-enforcement expert as "one of the kingpins" in video piracy. For the past eight years, he's been supplying black-market hardware to hundreds of thousands of families scattered across rural America. The hardware has one simple purpose: to descramble TV transmissions so that people who own satellite dishes can watch superstations and sports events without paying the usual fees. This so-called kingpin has a sense of humor. His alias is "Ron MacDonald" (the misspelling is deliberate). But his business is no joke. Consumers may be spending as much as half a billion US dollars every year to receive pirated satellite TV. The numbers are hard to believe, but they can be extrapolated. In the United States, according to the Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association (SBCA), there are about 3.7 million home satellite TV dishes. Most are owned by farmers, country folk, the last types you'd expect to be law breakers; yet according to General Instrument, designer of the decoder hardware, only 1.8 million dishes are equipped with legitimate descrambling modules. This means that nearly 2 million dishes are unaccounted for. If they have no descrambling equipment, they can only receive a few stations: the Home Shopping Network, the Weather Channel, and various religious networks that are broadcast "in the clear." How many people do you think spend thousands of dollars on a dish for home shopping networks? Let's be conservative and assume that fully half of the 2 million "mystery users" are depriving themselves in this way. That still leaves at least a million who do want to watch movies, superstations, and the other scrambled goodies. Those viewers must use illegal equipment to achieve that goal. Usually, a TV dealer is the intermediary who buys parts and software from a pirate such as "Ron" and then discreetly offers to modify a dish owner's decoder so that it will receive many stations for free. The federal penalties for this back-room electronics handiwork are mind-boggling: a US$500,000 fine or five years in jail, or both. Some dealers have been imprisoned, yet my sources indicate that there are still at least a thousand operating outside the law, because the money is good, or because they are ornery individuals who feel there's a principle involved. As a dealer in Arkansas told me, "The airwaves should belong to the people. If a TV signal comes trespassing onto my property, I should be free to do any damn thing I want with it, and it's none of the government's business." In Canada, the story has a different twist. In order to protect Canadian culture, the government limits the amount of US programming that local cable networks can carry. As a result, consumers buy dishes so that they can watch American TV. This, however, creates a problem: most American programmers don't own the right to sell their wares outside the United States. Consequently, they can't accept subscriptions from Canadian viewers, which means that of approximately 500,000 dishes in Canada, almost all are violating US copyright law, quite apart from regulations on the export of decoder equipment. In Mexico and in the Bahamas, the situation is the same: you can't legally subscribe to US programming, which means that every single viewer, by definition, is violating US law. The capital of the Bahamas is Nassau, located just the other side of a bridge from my hotel room on Paradise Island. The town is an uneasy mix of ultrarich and ultrapoor and has been scarred by two waves of imperialism. The British installed a government, laws, some funky little roads, and the metric system. The Americans added an airport, dollar-denominated currency, and a bunch of modern tourist resorts. Colonel Sanders and Tony Roma are doing business overlooking the marina -- but that's just a facade, a clumsy imitation of Mall Town USA, catering to visitors for whom familiarity breeds contentment. Two blocks back from the water, Mall Town gives way to Shanty Town, where local families live in colorfully painted tumbledown huts. Dogs lie around in the dirt, and skinny kids haul water from a communal faucet. Still, even here among thickets of date palms and cypresses, you find 8-foot dishes aimed at the sky. The only local channel is a graveyard of old movies and threadbare sitcoms, and the craving for ESPN, CNN, and HBO is universal. Even some of the humblest homes on the island have dishes outside.

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