What is The Scene?

The Warez scene, mostly referred to as The Scene (often capitalized) is a term of reference used to describe an underground community of people that specialize in the illegal distribution of pirated material, currently being TV, movies, music/music videos, games (all platforms), applications (all platforms), ebooks, and pornography. The Scene itself is meant to be hidden from the public, only being shared between the groups. However, as files were leaked straight from the beginning, and the popularity of the files outside The Scene started growing, unknown individuals from The Scene itself started leaking the files and uploading them to filehosts, torrents and ed2k. Today, you can see forums, blogs, websites etc. that offer either torrents, ed2k or filehost download links to files released in The Scene everywhere on the Net, which proves the popularity of The Scene is both global and one of the most wanted (both by regular individuals and anti-piracy organisations) communities internationally.

 The Scene has no central leadership, or location, or other conventional distinguishing marks of an organization. The groups themselves create a ruleset for each Scene category (for example MP3 or TV) that then becomes the active rules for encoding such material. The groups must follow all these rules when uploading material, and if their release has a technical error or breaks a rule in this ruleset, other groups may "nuke" (more info below) their release. Groups are in constant competition to get release up as fast as possible, even though there are no real "rewards" for their work (that is, except for access to The Scene). These rulesets include a rigid set of rules that warez groups (grps) must follow in releasing and managing material. First appearing around the time of BBSes, The Scene primarily relates to a community of people dealing with and distributing media content for which special skills and advanced softwares are required.