Abstract:
There exists an online community known as the Warez Scene, which focuses on downloading, cracking, and distributing paid licensed software/games for free in the form of piracy. These pirates, as they call themselves, have one goal: to remove the digital protection that companies have placed in these games. Such digital protections, known as DRMs, exist to make sure a digital product is accessed and used via legal and legitimate means. However, crackers within the scene spend days, even weeks working to infiltrate this protection system, which manifests in different ways within each digital product. They do this work to release said digital product for free and thus secure no financial gain.
In this thesis, I ponder the question, why? Why do crackers, who are sometimes teams of people, work around the clock to infiltrate a DRM and release the cracked software to the public? Through netnography I narrowed it down to three reasons, each with a dedicated chapter: (1) Aspiration and Competition, this is where I look into one part of motivation and how competition drives these groups to crack bigger and harder games. (2) Creativity and Problem Solving, in this Chapter I show how cracking is considered an art. I show different difficulty levels of cracking and how these DRM companies find new ways to protect their game, and in turn, how these crackers find ways to infiltrate this protection. And finally (3) the Aesthetics of the Warez Scene, where I look into the warez scene as a whole through the lens of art. I look at where the scene is situated online and how its artistic representation helps fuel these crackers to take part in a “fantasy” online world.
It is important that we look into this to find behavioral patterns to figure out how precarious labor pertains to not only legal forms of labor, but underground methods as well. Moreover, this thesis intends to expand on the existing scholarship that exists on the warez scene.
