Warez is a long standing term to describe various aspects of sharing copyrighted content and all that it entails. Detailing its complete etymology, as well as the related terms, is left as an exercise for the reader but know it is a corruption of the word wares (as in "I have these wares for sale on my market stall"). You will also have to take on faith that the term was near ubiquitous for many years.
In a recent discussion on the forums it was intimated that the term was no longer in current usage, indeed having effectively died off some 10 years prior (a time before many members may have joined this internet lark). Being old and out of the loop then rather than face being laughed at when I was the one attempting to do the laughing "to a search engine we go!".
One list of top gaming websites and top tech websites later. A great many still list it in their terms of use, news stories, headlines and more besides, however a distinct number of the results were from over a decade ago (something you would not expect given the attention "copyright infringement" still gets), and quite a few of the more recent instances were quotes from senior game developers (a group that is not largely composed of spring chickens, and often have a fairly interesting history with the concept). Said terms of use could also be written off as a legacy thing as well. Time to dig deeper

There is a rather nice word frequency search provided by google in their "ngrams viewer". Link

A downward trend in the time period concerned.
As nobody writes books any more then historical search terms are also available to be searched. Pictured below is also with the addition of torrent as a means to compare.

The trend pattern continues. Note that the linked and pictured versions use worldwide searches and then includes a lot of Eastern Europe, it seems to hold if you limit it to the usual "multi5" (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian) countries as well.

What remains of usenet searches, though usenet is mostly composed of older technically inclined people these days, appears to show a similar trend (save for groups often being named warez but given the age of such things...). Perhaps more curiously still is torrentfreak, a popular news source dedicated to covering the events related to piracy, intellectual property law as it pertains to said same and related concepts, also uses it rather sparingly or when quoting if their internal search engine is to be believed.


Unlike the poem ours is always to reason why, though as a spoiler for the upcoming section there are no answers or satisfactory conclusions. There are a great many other terms used by all sorts of groups -- infringing copies, backups, pirated copies, pirated materials, stolen works, copied games, cracked software and the list goes on.

Linguistically Warez is a proper noun (even has a capital) that is not immediately obvious. Such a thing could be responsible for a downfall but again it was near ubiquitous. At the same time the term torrent (also a proper noun and completely non obvious) exploded so maybe it was just that.
Occasionally you find hidden cabals of word pushers. GBAtemp tends not to be invited to such things and as most such things are more or less like this then we don't complain too hard. The results of such things do however leak out from time to time. In the case of the thing linked it is the 2007 version of the "The International Game Journalists Association and Games Press Present The Video Game Style Guide And Reference Manual". Being 2007 it is thus before/around the cutoff but it does mention it in its terms list.
Journalists are but one type of language pusher so maybe they went with lawyers, guns and money. While no direct lawyer action is expected you can lean on people "don't use the word and you get this nice interview".
2008 was a high tech time (game wise we were enjoying GTA4 and Fallout 3) but perhaps not so much as today. To that end were people noticing stories being left out of searches as "warez copy of fallout 3 releases weeks ahead of street date" (for the record Fallout_3_REVIEW_COPY_XBOX360-DiPLODOCUS was 9th of October for a game that hit on the 28th of the same month) got filtered? It is not impossible.
Were advertisers (themselves usually the games and tech industry rather than general products) partially responsible? Quite possible actually as there are all sorts of things they ask for and this would be a banal sounding one. Not sure what it might gain -- you lose a cool term with a z in it and in place have something banal like backup or wrong sounding like pirate. Everything is still discussed and everybody still knows what goes.
Was it an actual linguistic distinction? The words most commonly paired with warez were probably group or Scene. This refers to a specific method of distribution and mindset (see also "Scene rules"), and around the same time the "p2p" scene wherein one did not have to take great pains to join secretive groups was exploding. Given the complete pig's breakfast that has been made of the term hacker (never mind cracker) over the years this seems unlikely but it is mentioned anyway.

Anyway do you still know/recognise the term? Is this idea that the term had fallen out of usage a surprise to you? Had you met it before? Is it rather quaint for you? Are you one of said younger audience that might be expected to have missed it entirely? Were you in a position to experience any of the "do as we say" aspects speculated upon above? Do you have some other reasoning for the trend? Discuss any aspect of this that you feel warrants it.

 

[LuigiXL]

It reminds me of the beginnings of the Amiga scene, but also collectively apply it to everything related since. Bring back group intros/trainers!

 

[Deleted User]

Interesting article. These days, I believe the term "backups" (quotation marks included) has widely replaced the term warez throughout the forum, though I still see the word being used occasionally in news articles describing console exploits (usually from sites that don't necessarily welcome that sort of behavior).

Besides, vernacular is an ever-changing thing, and the term did seem to reach its height over 10 years ago. The fact that businesses are using lingo that's over a decade old doesn't necessarily surprise me.

I much prefer the term Warez, and roms, as opposed to what the current kids are mistakenly calling "Homebrew"
I blame that ENTIRELY on the "Homebrew Channel" being misused to spread pirated games.
At the end of the day, all that does is make things infinitely harder for us actual Homebrew developers, as we're buried under a pile of pirated content.

Bah, Humbug </grumpy>

IIRC, Smea, one of the devs in the 3DS Hacking Scene, was dead-set against piracy, and tried to keep things as contained to userland as possible. I guess it wasn't to prevent piracy altogether, but rather, to minimize his involvement with the development of tools that would enable piracy.

Likewise, many of said tools take a "no-tolerance" policy towards that sort of behavior. I'm one of the moderators for the Community freeShop server, and the staff there has every right to deny offering assistance to anyone suspected of using the tool for piracy.

Choice link
http://mentalfloss.com/article/64984/science-behind-why-people-hate-word-moist

...people hate the word "moist"? I was kind of under the impression that the opposite was true.

 

[Darth Meteos]

using euphemisms for the benefit of sites that want to stay afloat has been the unspoken meme for a generation at this point
in the end, we do it because we love you dearly and don't want to see you go away

 

[kuwanger]

I have seen plenty of style guides, phrasing suggestions, editor guides and discussions of said same I had not seen it frowned upon.

What I am aware of is that "intellectual property" and "copyright infringement" are both terms that have been heavily pushed by companies like Microsoft and the BSA which I'd presume are the originators of a push towards such terminology. More the point, certain sites--*cough*this one*cough*--have made the transition to promoting or at least tolerating "warez" to being marginal to substantially against it, and that requires a whitewash of sorts.

I might also have to disagree with it only having illegitimate uses, though I suppose they could have got away with that.

People don't tend to Google "murder", "rape", or "jaywalking" (outside of Google News/Yahoo News now that they're things) without Google presuming something about intent, I imagine. Except in this case this is equivalent to "murderz", the in-subgroup term for [now fictional] streaming murder, which really double-downs on the intention.

While it was something of a cheesy segway I would have to ask what percentage volume of human textual communication could be said to happen via books today as compared to online text?

That's definitely a good question, but I don't think that's exactly sequitur. By volume newspapers, magazines, and letters have probably dominated textual communication for at least the past couple centuries in many areas. Those are precisely the things that have heavily shifted to the internet because those are more short to mid-term communication mediums. Books are meant more for long-term storage of information or as something that requires a substantial amount of effort to craft. So, their nature is less above volume but more about the quality of it. One book writes a sentence but 20+ papers quote it.

Having gone beyond that, I think the better question might be how relevant are books as the actual long-term, reliable, and/or substantial storage medium. I can go on Youtube and find 20 different tutorials to do a thing, but beyond a lot of them being quite terrible, it's almost certain that if I go back in 2 years I'll get a whole new batch of tutorials and it might be near impossible to find again the tutorial I used because searching Youtube/videos is terrible. Websites tend to last a lot longer, but I routinely find broken/missing pages (that archive.org doesn't have) when I start looking for "retro" stuff. In comparison there's usually a much lower volume of books (although plenty of "me too" (not that one) books appear) which can make the one you want harder to find.

The real value books have is probably libraries/curation. We have aggregators for online content, but we have very few curators. The ones we do have tend to be for things like games, but that too creates a model that's a lot less clear for long-term reliability. So, we have books. We have curation. Until we have something similar to libraries that can function* I don't see digital/online being a sufficient replacement and I think most authors realize this.

I did consider having a paragraph pondering such things (and once I switched from the default US to the worldwide option it was dominated by such places, despite rather smaller populations) and finances but decided against it in the end.

This I entirely understand. Honestly, I only know what I've read and not from personal experience. Even if I did have experience, it would distract from the main point of the term "warez" vs the concept of "warez" and how it's treated in other cultures/societies. As another person commented, to me Warez relates to the BBS scene, so in most ways that's where the area of exploration would probably reach both in its origin as well as its reach and it's [effective] demise.

* I know this is getting very long already, but this relates to DRM, copyright, and the easy of copying which conversely makes it hard to argue for any sort of archiving. Books are hard to copy and are bought one at a time, so that's a whole other thing. Ebook formats aren't sufficiently standard/safe (again, DRM) to use as a basis for a long-term library offline, so the only usable access is use of a digital library collection service (which is curated in the same way Origin is curated). Of course Google ignored all that, and look where they're at.

 

[Ev1l0rd]

Why wouldn't I be familiar with it? Seems like still a pretty commonly used term online nowadays... or maybe I just have an outdated vernacular.

Piracy is the act of illegally downloading, warez are the files themselves.

 

[grey72]

"warez" sounds like it'd fit right into some vaporwave asthetic stuff.

 

[Washudoll]

I'm getting old young people :-)

 

[FAST6191]

Re: softwarez can we pretend I wrote (soft)warez in the opening post?

What I am aware of is that "intellectual property" and "copyright infringement" are both terms that have been heavily pushed by companies like Microsoft and the BSA which I'd presume are the originators of a push towards such terminology. More the point, certain sites--*cough*this one*cough*--have made the transition to promoting or at least tolerating "warez" to being marginal to substantially against it, and that requires a whitewash of sorts.



People don't tend to Google "murder", "rape", or "jaywalking" (outside of Google News/Yahoo News now that they're things) without Google presuming something about intent, I imagine. Except in this case this is equivalent to "murderz", the in-subgroup term for [now fictional] streaming murder, which really double-downs on the intention.



That's definitely a good question, but I don't think that's exactly sequitur. By volume newspapers, magazines, and letters have probably dominated textual communication for at least the past couple centuries in many areas. Those are precisely the things that have heavily shifted to the internet because those are more short to mid-term communication mediums. Books are meant more for long-term storage of information or as something that requires a substantial amount of effort to craft. So, their nature is less above volume but more about the quality of it. One book writes a sentence but 20+ papers quote it.

Having gone beyond that, I think the better question might be how relevant are books as the actual long-term, reliable, and/or substantial storage medium. I can go on Youtube and find 20 different tutorials to do a thing, but beyond a lot of them being quite terrible, it's almost certain that if I go back in 2 years I'll get a whole new batch of tutorials and it might be near impossible to find again the tutorial I used because searching Youtube/videos is terrible. Websites tend to last a lot longer, but I routinely find broken/missing pages (that archive.org doesn't have) when I start looking for "retro" stuff. In comparison there's usually a much lower volume of books (although plenty of "me too" (not that one) books appear) which can make the one you want harder to find.

The real value books have is probably libraries/curation. We have aggregators for online content, but we have very few curators. The ones we do have tend to be for things like games, but that too creates a model that's a lot less clear for long-term reliability. So, we have books. We have curation. Until we have something similar to libraries that can function* I don't see digital/online being a sufficient replacement and I think most authors realize this.



This I entirely understand. Honestly, I only know what I've read and not from personal experience. Even if I did have experience, it would distract from the main point of the term "warez" vs the concept of "warez" and how it's treated in other cultures/societies. As another person commented, to me Warez relates to the BBS scene, so in most ways that's where the area of exploration would probably reach both in its origin as well as its reach and it's [effective] demise.

* I know this is getting very long already, but this relates to DRM, copyright, and the easy of copying which conversely makes it hard to argue for any sort of archiving. Books are hard to copy and are bought one at a time, so that's a whole other thing. Ebook formats aren't sufficiently standard/safe (again, DRM) to use as a basis for a long-term library offline, so the only usable access is use of a digital library collection service (which is curated in the same way Origin is curated). Of course Google ignored all that, and look where they're at.

I don't know if here has taken a stance against it. The only real difference in rules has either been specificity when WAD became a term for more than Doom assets (and related concepts) and what keys do or do not count as. We could debate the scene releases being off the front page but all the discussions I saw were "too much effort, too little gain" rather than appearing "legit" or whatever. Said release posts are still there (though they may have been folded into general forum headings during shuffles there). There might be a few fairly vocally against it types where they were somewhat absent before. Other times I have heard things coming out of the mouths of 18 year olds which we were giggling at some 5 years before when there were some leaked slides from an RIAA school talk.

The flood the term to displace another idea is interesting, especially with the trend towards a copy-paste the newswire service. I am reminded of one of the compilation clips of hackers in films and TV from a hacker con (probably a c3 from 26c3 to 30c3, you will have to go on their video archives rather than youtube for obvious reasons). One of the remarks there was "either the writers read a very obscure paper (for this common style of hack, indeed it was passe for hacker cons by that point) from Microsoft, or read wikipedia".

At the same time the demise of "corrections" in news would also see me having little trouble believing that several someones did a little find-replace on a database at some point.

As far letters, telegrams and such go then to some extent it is. However in what I hope does not make me sound like too much of a complete silicon valley bellend I would ask if this online lark represents a fundamental shift in the way things happen. I would agree the rather... ephemeral nature of such things is tricky (nice link on the matter and the nature of the owners of all the data even worse (a comment I saw the other week was "I signed up to facebook when it promised to be email 2.0, look instead what we got"). It is not then lost on me that my "research" earlier presumably included nothing of facebook, twitter or instagram and thus for all my talk just now of fundamental shifts I probably missed out no small percentage of that.

At the same time I recently picked up a copy of "knowledge illustrated magazine of science" from the late 1800s (it is basically an annual for all the editions in a given period), and it includes all the various letters and discussions from the "general public" on the articles (evolution was still new, germ theory was still debated -- the discussions of TB/consumption being eye opening to say the least). All sorts of things there resonate massively here, and other things seem quite strange. Much gleaned here and I suppose that is one of the reasons I keep and keep buying such things.
As far as "hard to copy" then the gear might be rarer, and to keep in line with the timeframes in the opening post maybe akin to telecine/"workprint" copies of films, but https://archive.org/scanning for the sorts of things that can be done.

Video tutorials is a subject close to my own heart as well. There are many things I have learned from them that previously would have had to be have been demonstrated in real life (or required a serious bit of experimentation on top of my already having some basic skills), or indeed times where I have been looking at a book covering something despite already knowing it down to the physics/geometry underpinning it and still being "lost". On the other hand I am routinely asked for video tutorials for ROM hacking (no shortage of text and image based things there) and find myself at a loss on how to usefully cover a lot of things in video form (and video editing is a long standing hobby of mine).

Anyway I am going massively off topic so I will leave it there.

 

[phalk]

I know the term and it's meaning, but I'm 30. I agree it's not used anymore nowadays. "Piracy" replaced it, as pirates are now proud of the act.

 

[RickBruiser]

Oh boy, this is getting my gray hair show. I used to own channels with such names on the old Dalnet days. These days are far behind me.

 

[Abstract3000]

How I miss the old days.... Long Live Imaginerz Warez & Pikachu Warez, Oscar, Serials 2k, Phrozen Crew, AM Crackz, Altavista.... and dont forget our special XDCC & FTP Servers being ran by our little bots on Undernet, when Effnet was home of the admins.

 

[WrathofGod]

I still use the term, then again I'm old.

 

[MasterJ360]

I still use that term based on how really active the said warez site is like daily active. Honestly I can't think of another name to give it other than saying "Piracy Site"

 

[FAST6191]

"Piracy" replaced it, as pirates are now proud of the act.

I have always found there to be an air of defiance, ambivalence, indifference or similar going on in such circles.

 

[gothteen]

Wow, i feel so old lol xD talking about warez made me think of share/freeware, kinda after those things 'warez' started to showed up so i kinda linked those haha

 

[EarthBound]

 

[Ericthegreat]

i am very familiar with the term "warez" mainly because torrent websites.. IIRC there was a torrent site i used in the past that used the term warez in the banner\description
but it used to be a common word...

I guess I haven't seen that word in a long time, but yes I know what it means.

 

[smf]

everyone knows it's spelt: w4r3z

mail trading was the best times.

 

[kuwanger]

As far as "hard to copy" then the gear might be rarer, and to keep in line with the timeframes in the opening post maybe akin to telecine/"workprint" copies of films, but https://archive.org/scanning for the sorts of things that can be done.

When I say this, I mean in the context of an attempt to attack online archives of a thing by lobbying groups. Nintendo recently sued two "libraries" of games. It's not that those games were actually easy to copy, but the degree of copying has staved off casual copying. When you get into books, it's even harder because the action can damage/destroy the source material--the link suggest otherwise but surely that depends heavily on the age/quality of the binding--which itself might make it impossible to find volunteers for digitization.

Of course like that link and like Google's efforts, the actual process has become a lot faster/better. So, the real point is in part the impression of the difficultly. How much time/effort to copy a whole digital library? How much to copy a stack of disks? A stack of rom catridges? A local library of books? It's a lot easier for a publisher to shut down any organization that's higher on the list. Conversely it's a lot easier for an author to justify the salary to write the book because of the relatively difficulty of digitization. I mean, have all books published in the US in 2016 been digitized yet?

 

[Jackson Ferrell]

So that's what the Khajit mean