Digital Pirates and the "Warez" Wars

"Every program you can think of can be found on the web, in a thousand different places in its complete version many weeks before it ever appears in the best shops, as everyone with the intelligence level of an eggplant soon discovers."

-Fravia "The Reverser"

The software on your computer -- the programs you use to send emails, write memos, surf the web, whatever -- are nothing but ones and zeros neatly arranged on a magnetic disk. As such, they are easily copied verbatim to another disk, or even a million other disks. That ease of distribution, what tech heads call "propagation," is both the basis for the multi-billion dollar software industry, and its biggest threat.

Since before Bill Gates made his first million hawking MS-DOS, software developers have been searching for ways to protect their creations from unauthorized copying. Back then, they employed strategies like printing access codes on irreproducible paper, or even requiring the user to take a pop quiz, the answers for which could only be found in the software manual. The methods are different today but things haven't changed all that much; copy protection was unsuccessful then, and is unsuccessful now.

The millions spent on increasingly complex copy protection schemes have proved fruitless because for every new development, a new wave of hackers swoop in to undermine the protection. While digital music piracy -- Napster and MP3s -- grabs the headlines day in and day out, a war is quietly brewing in the software underground.

One increasingly powerful army in that war comprises highly knowledgeable software "gangs." These gangs, usually made up of software developers and technologists, work to reverse the protections built into software products, enabling others to distribute the products free of charge. Make no mistake -- these gangs are not your rogue technophiles from the MS-DOS days, but a large, highly organized movement interested in "cracking" every piece of software that sees the light of day.

The groups stay underground by using pseudonyms and exploiting the decentralized nature of the Internet. Some have been tracked to Norway, Russia, Hong Kong, Manila and various cities around the U.S. The hacked software they traffic is known as warez (pronounced like "where's"). According to the software industry, software piracy accounts for as much as $12 billion in losses.

That's enough lost revenue for the Department of Justice to take note. In December, warez grabbed front-page headlines when law enforcement agents busted a large piracy ring known as DrinkOrDie. The bust consisted of more than 100 raids across the country, from dorms at UCLA and MIT to the Bank of America's data centers. Over 120 computers were seized in the bust. DrinkOrDie members Kentaga Kartadinata, 29, and Mike Nguyen, 26 were officially charged with copyright infringement on January 23, and many more may face charges as well.

DrinkOrDie (DoD) got its start in Russia in 1993. Various reports credit one of two hackers -- Deviator and Jimmy Jamez -- with founding the organization. Despite modest beginnings, DoD garnered a worldwide membership by 1995, when its hackers completed their first claim to fame -- releasing Windows 95 over the Internet two weeks before Microsoft could release the software to the public. DoD was also integral in the development of software that defeats encryption of DVDs. That program -- DVD Speed Ripper -- along with the better known DeCSS, led to the indictment of 18 year-old Norwegian hacker Jon Johansen earlier this month. Because of these and hundreds more warez releases after it, the U.S. Customs service called DoD one of the most accomplished and sophisticated software piracy groups in the world.

Hacker's High

But unlike many other piracy groups, this breed of hacker isn't in it for the money. Rather, hackers like Kartadinata, Nguyen and Johansen thrive on the sheer exhilaration of showing up the corporate competition. To defeat a company's highly touted copy protection system is the warez hacker's opus. Such dreams drive otherwise reputable technologists and engineers to risk arrest, fines, imprisonment -- all for the thrill of belonging to the warez scene.