It goes on everywhere, all the time. It goes on underground, in the shadows, even in broad daylight. Whether by shady men in unassuming dark cloaks, or by upstanding businessmen in slick suits, software piracy is everywhere. I can’t even limit it to software piracy, as (media plug) you would have to be living in a hole in the wall to not know about the RIAA investigating and suing Napster for pirated MP3s. Now we must ask ourselves, how is this all accomplished, what is actually done, and for God’s sakes, why?
To ask why is rather futile. Hackers, crackers, slackers, and others in the underground community will all give you different reasons. It depends upon who you talk to. Some do it for the learning aspect. Some do it for the prestige and respect from others in the underground community. Others do it because its free software (the “cheap bastard” motivation). Still others do it as a statement against the upright, an anarchist lashing out, per se. To say that the reasons are varied is by far an understatement. This does provide a glimpse into the mind of not just the underground, but all of mankind, as they represent some of the uninhibited actions of people. Like a child in a candy store, they thought about stealing, but pirates actually took action. Perhaps to tell their friends, maybe for the excitement, maybe just to get something for nothing.
What gets pirated? Quite honestly, everything and anything gets stolen. People steal what they want, or need. In the software set, the primary things to be pirated are applications, games, and operating systems. Music is also pirated quite a bit, as are full-length movies (assuming you have the time to download them). Some of the things less often pirated would be things like fonts (yes, fonts) and less popular media like sound clips and video clips. Let us not forget one of the largest businesses in piracy on the internet…porn!
Piracy, by definition, is the unauthorized use or reproduction of copyrighted or patented material. How it is pirated depends greatly upon what gets pirated.
Let’s start with productivity applications and utilities in general. They are designed to be run without the CD, as most users in business settings multitask, and many businesses buy multiple licenses but only one CD of the software. This means that the CD very likely does not need to be in the CD-ROM drive to run it. If such is the case, we can easily forego the CD altogether. To pirate an application is rather simple, and is generally accomplished by taking the entire CD directory structure and compressing it into one or more files. The tool of choice for this is usually WinZip or WinRAR. WinZip offers great compression, at the expense of having a single large zip file. WinRAR, on the other hand, allows you to span multiple files, which means that whoever is downloading your pirated software will be able to download many smaller files. This allows them to resume without having lost a big chunk of time. The end user just decompresses all of the files with the proper decompression tool, and runs the installer from the hard drive as usual. Once the program is installed, they delete the install files and continue with their work.
Some applications and utilities don’t even necessarily come on CD, as the companies allow download from their site. This opens up a few newer areas of piracy (new is a relative term, as most piracy has been around for a long time).
If you have ever downloaded a demo, you may have encountered a request to ‘Register your copy for Full Functionality’ or something akin thereto. This means that the demo you installed is inherently able to function to the full extent of the program; all you need is the serial number or key. With literally thousands of these types of programs in existence, it seems logical to the ‘benevolent’ hacker that there should be a list of serial numbers by program, and so it is. Pages upon pages exist of alphabetically listed programs with serial numbers. Often times programs will change the serial number generation routine with the version number, so serial number archives often have multiple serials for a single program, listed by program version number.
