Types of warez

There is generally a distinction made between different sub-types of warez:

• Apps / Appz - Applications: Generally a retail version of a software package.
  
• Cracks / Crackz - Cracked applications: A modified executable or more (usually one) and/or a library (usually one) or more and/or a patch designed to turn a trial version of a software package into the full version and/or bypass anti-piracy protections.
  
• Games / Gamez - Games: This scene concentrates on both computer based games, and video game consoles, often released as ISOs or, for console games, ROMs.
  
• Moviez - Movies: Pirated movies can be released while still in theaters or from CDs/DVDs/HD-DVDs prior to the actual retail date.
  
• NoCD/NoDVD/FixedExe/Portable - A file modification that allows an installed program to be run without inserting the CD or DVD into the drive.
  
• TV-Rips - Television programs: With commercials edited out, television shows can be released within a few hours after airing. DVD Rips of television series fall under this sub-type.
  
• mp3 - MP3 audio: Pirated albums, singles, or other audio format usually obtained by ripping a CD or a radio broadcast and released in a compressed audio format such as MP3.
  
• E-Bookz/ebooks/e-books - Books: These include pirated ebooks, scanned books, scanned comics, cartoons etc.
  
• Scriptz - Scripts: These include pirated scripts coded by companies in PHP, ASP, and other languages. (such as vbulletin, invision power board, etc)
  
• Templates - Templates: These include pirated website templates coded by companies.
  
• DOX - Computer game add-ons: These include nocds, cracks, trainers, cheat codes etc.
  
• 0-Day Warez (pronounced as zero day warez sometimes as "0 days") - This refers to any copy written work that has been released the same day as the original product, or sometimes even before.
  
• MVids (Music videos) - Can be ripped from TV, HDTV and DVDs.
  

Movie piracy
Movie piracy was looked upon as impossible by the major studios. When dial-up was common in early and mid 1990s, movies distributed on the Internet tended to be small. The techniques that were usually used to make them small were to use compression software and lower the video quality. At that time, the largest piracy threat was software.

However, along with the rise in broadband internet connections beginning around 1998, higher quality movies began to see widespread distribution – with the release of DeCSS, ISO images copied directly from the original DVDs were slowly becoming a feasible distribution method. Today, movie sharing has become so common that it has caused major concern amongst movie studios and their representative organizations. Because of this the MPAA is often running campaigns during movie trailers where it tries to discourage people from copying material without permission. Unlike the music industry, which has had online music stores available for several years, the movie industry has moved to online distribution only in 2006 with the launch of Amazon Unbox

Pre-release: Screener (SCR) • Telecine (TC) • Workprint (WP)
In-cinema: Cam • Telesync (TS)
Home video (rips): Disk image • DVD-Rip • HDTV-Rip • PDTV • R5 • VHS-Rip

Distribution
There are several methods in which warez material could be distributed. The methods include, but are not limited to: Mail, Modem (Modem), File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and File eXchange Protocol (FXP), Usenet, Xabi Direct Client Connection (XDCC, read Direct Client-to-Client (IRC / Direct Client-to-Client (DCC))), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Peer-to-peer (P2P) clients such as eMule (ED2K) Limewire, Warez P2P (iP2P) and BitTorrent (BT), and Sneakernet, Rapidshare, Modem Tapping (for longer downloads.) Forums are a modern community method to distribute warez as well.

File formats of warez
A CD software release can contain up to 737 megabytes of data, which presented challenges when sending over the Internet, particularly in the late 1990s when broadband was unavailable to most home consumers. These challenges apply to an even greater extent for a single-layer DVD release, which can contain up to 4.7 GB of data. The warez scene made it standard practice to split releases up into many separate pieces, called disks, using several file compression formats: (historical TAR, LZH, ACE, UHA, ARJ), ZIP and most commonly RAR. The original purpose of these "disks" was so that each .rar file could fit on a single 1.44 MB 3 1/2 inch floppy disk. With the growing size of games, this is no longer feasible, as hundreds of disks would need to be used. Most groups will now release a title with disks sized 15,000,000 bytes (14,3 megabytes) or 50,000,000 bytes (47,7 megabytes) in bigger release.

This method has many advantages over sending a single large file:
The two-layer compression could sometimes achieve almost a tenfold improvement over the original DVD/CD image. The overall file size is cut down and lessens the transfer time and bandwidth required.
If there is a problem during the file transfer and data was corrupted, it is only necessary to resend the few corrupted RAR files instead of resending the entire large file.
This method also creates the facility of downloading from many sources.

With the rise of modern peer-to-peer programs, which automatically break files up for partial downloads, compression via RAR, ZIP, and KGB is still commonplace but the breaking up of files is less so.

Releases of software titles often come in two forms. The full form is a full version of a game or application, generally released as CD or DVD-writable disk images (BIN or ISO files). A rip is a cut-down version of the title in which additions included on the legitimate DVD/CD (generally Portable Document Format (PDF) manuals, help files, tutorials, and audio/video media) are omitted. In a game rip, generally all game video is removed, and the audio is compressed to MP3 or Vorbis, which must then be decoded to its original form before playing. These rips are very rare today, as most modern broadband connections can easily handle the full files, and the audio is usually already compressed by the original producer in some fashion. A nuke is stand-alone version of a game or application, in which the installer has been removed or replaced and the program is modified to execute without installation into a particular directory.

Motivations and arguments
Software Pirates generally exploit the international nature of the copyright issue to avoid law enforcement in specific countries.

The production and/or distribution of warez is illegal in most countries. However, it is typically overlooked in poorer third world countries with weak or non-existent IP protection. Additionally, some first world countries have loopholes in legislation that allow the warez to continue.

Legality
Warez is often a form of copyright infringement punishable as either a civil wrong or a crime. The laws and their application to warez activities may vary greatly from country to country. Generally, however, there are four elements of criminal copyright infringement: the existence of a valid copyright, that copyright was infringed, the infringement was wilful and the infringement was either for commercial gain or substantial (a level often set by statute). Often public sites such as pages hosting torrent files claim that they are not breaking any laws because they are not offering the actual data but link only to other places or peers that contain the infringing material.

In addition, nearly all Web providers do not permit the hosting of warez, and will delete any site found to be hosting them.

Depending on the country, in some cases, software piracy might become legal and encouraged. As a dispute between Iran and USA over membership in WTO, and subsequent blocking of Iran's attempts at full-membership in the organization by the USA, has led Iran to encourage US software piracy. Subsequently, there has been a surge in Iranian "warez" and "crackz" websites, as unlike other countries, the Iranian laws do not forbid hosting them inside Iran. See: Iran and copyright issues

Terminology
The word warez is intended as a plural of "ware", short for computer software. Thus it is intended to be pronounced like the word wares or wears [weə(ɹ)z], but some people apply a nonstandard pronunciation like the English pronunciation of Juárez [wɑɹɛz].

Piracy like all other words has different shades of meaning. Some denotative, others connotative, some implying social acceptability, others pejorative. Whoever controls access to the discourse is able to pick the words with meanings that frame the reader's response. While the term 'piracy' is commonly used to describe a significant range of activities, most of which are unlawful, the relatively neutral meaning in this context is "...mak[ing] use of or reproduc[ing] the work of another without authorization". Some groups (including the Free Software Foundation) object to the use of this and other words such as "theft" because they represent a partisan attempt to create a prejudice that is used to gain political ground. "Publishers often refer to prohibited copying as "piracy." In this way, they imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them" (FSF). The FSF advocate the use of terms like "prohibited copying" or "unauthorized copying", or "sharing information with your neighbor."

On the other hand, many self-proclaimed "software pirates" take pride in the term, thinking of the romanticized Hollywood portrayal of pirates and sometimes jokingly using pirate talk in their conversations. Although the use of this term is controversial, it is embraced by some groups such as Pirates With Attitude.

DDL Sites or better Direct Download Sites are sites where warez is submitted. It indexes the warez & gives links to the pages where the download links are available. They often just infinitely redirect users to other sites.