Do you know the term "Warez"?
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
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.
