3. Warez and cracktro

Today is the third lesson in the "Introduction to Demoscene" series: Warez and Cracktro. Before we start, I will run a few games from the 80s. We will find that when a backup of a floppy disk or tape is put into the emulator and run, there will be an animation shown before the content the game. These animations are not the work of the game developers, but the people who cracked the game, which is what the demoscene calls crack-intro, or cracktro.

The practice of crack-intro production by hobbyists is widely considered to be the origin of the demoscene. Today's topic is about cracktros and the ground from which they were born: the software cracking community and the "warez" (voluntary pirate) community. These communities emerged alongside the personal computer and continue to this day, and among the various underground communities associated with computer culture, they are quite visible and have left a far-reaching impact.

Software: Not naturally commodity

Software cracking and warez are mostly taboo everywhere today except for pirate parties in Europe, where it is often viewed as an "adversary" only in the context of intellectual property protection, without concern for the inner workings of the community, and the non-profit warez community is often confused with commercial for profit piracy activities.

In today's conception, it is taken for granted that software is sold as a commodity. But for more than 20 years spanning from the late 1960s, when independent software vendors (ISVs) emerged, until the 1990s, when countries began to include software in their copyright protection, the question of whether computer programs should be legally protected, what forms of computer programs are protected, and under what type of protection, such as copyright or patent, has been a controversial topic.

Before the 1960s, the software that people ran on computers usually came from only two sources: as part of the computer distribution, usually provided by hardware manufacturers, which were usually operating systems and development tools closely related to the hardware, such as assemblers, high-level language compilers, monitoring programs, etc.; and the other part of the software was developed by the users themselves, usually software that was closely related to the business that the buyer was using the computer for, such as airplane booking systems, library management systems, etc. At that time, the users of computers were basically large research institutions, universities or companies that had enough financial resources to set up their own internal software development teams. When customers did not have their own software development teams, hardware developers like IBM or Digital would customize the overall solution including software at the request of customers, and develop software for customers as a service attached to the hardware. This way of selling software on hardware is called "bundled software", which is not only widespread in the mainframe era, but also quite common in today's server market.

In the 1960s, a number of computer companies emerged that did not sell hardware, but specialized in developing software. These companies were often not affiliated with hardware companies, but rather contracted directly with users to developed software; these software companies were called "independent software vendors", or ISVs. Applied Data Research which founded in 1959 is often considered the first ISV in history, and their patent for a sequencing system registered in the United States in 1968 (US3380029A) was the first software patent in history.

At first, hardware providers such as IBM still held an overwhelmingly strong position, and independent software vendors were in a state of "survival in the cracks". The IBM monopoly case lasted 13 years until it was dismissed in 1982. The charges included monopolizing the market for general-purpose data computers, predatory pricing, and unfairly low prices for educational customers to impede entry and growth of competitors.

Applied Data Research also filed an antitrust lawsuit against IBM in April of the same year and settled out of court on favorable terms - IBM paid Applied Data Research $1.4 million in settlement fees and agreed to resell Autoflow software developed by Applied Data Research.

This series of legal actions shook up IBM's bundled software model, and in response to the lawsuit made significant business adjustments to IBM. In 1969 IBM announced that it would bundle software and services from hardware sales and charge separately for software and services. This "unbundling" action announced the beginning of the era of software as a stand-alone product. The California Computer Museum describes this event under the title "Software Becomes a Product".

One of the subsequent effects of software "unbundling" was that Microsoft became the operating system provider for the IBM PC, and that the IBM PC adopted an open architecture and allowed other manufacturers to develop compatible models. When IBM launched its first PC in 1981, the U.S. Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit was still pending, so IBM chose to purchase its PC operating system from Microsoft to avoid becoming new evidence of its monopoly.

Software Copyright: Inconsistent Perceptions

The independent sale of software only began to become commonplace in the United States in the 1970s, and other countries tend to lag even further behind. But even in the United States, a leader in the commercialization of software, the controversy over what form software distributed could be protected by copyright law was still not settled in the early 1980s.

Software sold in the 1970s was often provided directly to the purchaser as software source code. In some cases software was printed in the form of a code listing. More common was the punched tape, which could be read directly by a machine, making it easier to copy, and in addition to being machine-readable, the holes on the punched tape were of such a size that they were visible to the naked eye, so that some skilled programmers could also restore the code of the software by reading the tape.

In December 1980, then-President Jimmy Carter had signed the Computer Software Copyright Act (Computer Software Copyright Act) allowing software programs to receive copyright protection similar to that of literary works, but it took several cases to establish what forms of software fell within the scope of the Act's protection.

One of the cases that established protection for software products that are not readable by humans was Apple Computer v. Franklin Computer in 1983. In the early 1980s, Apple II computer knockoffs were popular, including several models in the Ace series developed by Franklin, which used firmware ROMs copied directly from Apple II computers. in March 1983 Apple sued Franklin for software infringement, and a U.S. court upheld Apple's suit and in January 1984 denied Franklin's appeal, and the protection of software distributed in machine-readable but human-unreadable binary form was only established.

As you can see in the above examples, it is often a long process to move from legal text to judicial practice. For example, in the United States, only the code (including source code and object code) that implements the function of the software is protected by software copyright, while the working principle of the software can be protected by patents. But in Europe, until now, software cannot be protected by patent rights.

The European software copyright protection also landed much later. The European Union's predecessor, the European Community, drafted in 1989 and issued the Council Directive on the Legal Protection of Computer Programs in 1991, which required member states to update their domestic legislation or administrative provisions to harmonize the Directive by January 1, 1993, but most countries completed their domestic legislation after this deadline. Prior to this deadline, there were several copyright pockets in Europe. This is not only due to the fact that the software industry in Europe started later than in the United States, but also due to competition and consumer protection concerns.

The 2012 case SAS v. World Programming Limited is representative of the current EU approach to software copyright, in which the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that the functionality of a computer program and the programming language it uses are not protected by copyright, allowing software developers to design compilers, interpreters, and other technologies for any publicly available programming language without using the code of the original designer of the programming language's implementation, design compilers, interpreters, and other technical implementations without being restricted by the original designer.

The situation in Europe is even more complicated if we take the Cold War into account. Before the merger of the two Germanies, there was some jurisprudence in East Germany that allowed software copying altogether. The article (Video Games In East Germany: The Stasi Played Along)[https://www.zeit.de/digital/games/2018-11/computer-games-gdr-stasi-surveillance-gamer-crowd] describes the video game scene in East Germany, mentioning the Leipzig District Court's ruling in September 1979 that computer software constitutes "Neither a scientific work nor a creative achievement".

So we find that until the late 1980s and early 1990s, the social perception and judicial practice around the world was not consistent as to whether computer software could have the same copyright protection as publications. And until practical laws were established, software copying was common in Europe and in some other parts of the world, and the definition of its behavior was a vague area for quite a long time.

As the world's number one software power, the United States has been promoting the concept of American-style software copyright in other countries through the WTO and other international institutions in recent years. With China's accession to the WTO, the United States also exerted a lot of pressure regarding China's somewhat loose software protection, but there are some voices that after 2002, China's legal provisions protect software to an even stricter degree than Europe's.

"Packaged software" and crackers

Although we have seen the emergence of independent software developers in the 1960s, commercial software entered the retail market only after the popularization of home computers. Users of mainframe computers were often institutional users with strong financial and technical capabilities, and they generally entered into direct sales or development contracts with software developers. "Custom software" usually refers to software that is made for a specific purpose, as opposed to the "packaged software" (shrink-wrapped software), in which multiple utilities are supplied to the customer in bundled form.

The customers for this type of software are usually ordinary users other than computer enthusiasts, whose computer knowledge is not as advanced as that of enthusiasts, and who often buy software for specific computer functions or tasks, such as word processing and other office work. Word processing tools on microcomputers, from the earliest Electric Pencil to the later popular WordStar, Word Perfect and Microsoft Word, were all sold as packaged software.

For the hobbyist community however, more often than not software is actually distributed as type-in program listing, many of which are printed in computer magazines that we mentioned in the previous lesson. Computer magazines of the 1980s would be considered "large" today, such as ZX Computing, which was known for its "over 120 pages of information and programs" as a major selling point, with a significant number of pages devoted to BASIC code listings.

The business logic of type-in program software distribution is similar to that of literary magazines publishing literary works. The game writers are paid for their contributions to the magazine, the magazine sells the magazine to its readers for revenue, and the readers read the code and enter it into their computers to use the software. But for non-hobbyists without programming skills, the threshold for entering the code for use is still a bit high. Therefore, the packaged software described earlier is usually available in the home computer market in the form of cassette tapes, floppy disks, or ROM cartridges. Cassette tapes and floppy disks are magnetic media, which are cheap to produce but also easier to copy, while ROM cartridges are more difficult to copy.

For the home computer market, ROM cartridges are a product form borrowed from the game console market. Since game consoles are designed for users without computer knowledges, cartridges are designed to be "plug and play". The first two home computers on the market that supported ROM cartridges were the Exidy Sorcerer in 1978 and the Atari 8-bit series in 1979, when Exidy was a major arcade developer and Atari was a pioneer in the home console market.

While teenagers have a natural affinity for video games, they don't have enough money to buy a lot of them. As in almost all teenage culture scenarios, they will exchange resources for social recognition with their classmates at school or friends in life without compensation. Naturally, they also want to copy and share the game with their buddies if the conditions allow. The battle between game developers and teenagers to copy and prevent copying games is the other side of the software protection coin beyond the tedious legal paperwork.

In order to prevent users from copying and sharing games and affecting game sales, developers of commercial games have developed a number of anti-copy tactics. As mentioned earlier, apart from ROM cassettes, there was not much that could be done on magnetic media such as magnetic tapes and floppy disks, so a great deal of anti-copying measures involved including other forms of physical media and props in cartridge games, such as game manuals, cards, board game style turntable props, or optical lenses.

In the 1980s, video game developers gathered a variety of whimsical ideas on software anti-copying measures, and many practices have actually turned video games into computer plus board game complexes, breaking through the limitations of software and tape and disk media itself by way of physical world props. Such practices also make copying games not only a process of media copying, but also an intellectual and technical challenge between crackers and game developers.

Obviously, the challenge of cracking the game copy protection did not deter teenagers, but rather inspired them to fight. As mentioned earlier, teenage gamers have gone through the initiation and training of entering code, and their understanding of computer software and hardware is no longer that of a typical home video game player who sees the platform as an inaccessible, indestructible "black box". They not only reverse engineer the game code to understand the logic and unlock its built-in copy protection, but also see this technical challenge as a competition among crackers, and those who are the first to crack the new game protection tend to achieve higher prestige in the enthusiast community.

Crack screen

The quest for glory and prestige within the community eventually leads software crackers to try to leave their name on the "fortress" they have conquered by modifying the game's startup screen or adding additional startup screens to the game with their nickname or logo. These are known as crack screens. This way, as the software is copied and spreads to more enthusiasts, the crackers' reputation spreads with it.

The earliest hardware platform on which crack screens appeared was probably the Apple II, and American computer historian Jason Scott has collected many crack screens from Apple II software in Textfiles.com, the earliest of which dates to 1981.

Many of the crack screens are simple, usually a banner of "Cracked by somebody", while more complex crack screens will have fancy typesetting and graphics. In addition, we can also see a lot of phone numbers in the crack screen. Those are BBS phone numbers.

Crack screens with BBS phone numbers are particularly common in the cracking community in the United States. Compared to Europe's popular form of cracking software released by mailing floppy disks or tapes, in the United States, dial-up BBS file download was a fairly common channel to provide computer software before the popularity of the Internet, and cracking software was also distributed through this form. Dial-up BBSes use telephone line and Modem to establish a direct connection between the server and the user, and do not rely on the Internet running on TCP/IP protocol, so there is no IP address and domain name, and the phone number for the BBS is to play the role of domain name for addressing different servers.

The demoscene emerged among these crackers, and Markku Reunanen, a lecturer at the Aalto University School of Arts and Design in Finland, wrote in his 2014 paper "How Those Crackers Became Us Demoscope Members" explains in detail how the demoscene gradually separated itself from the cracking community, citing a passage from Thomas "Tomaes" Gruetzmacher's PC Demoscene FAQ.

In the late 1980s the legal part of the cracking and warez scene slowly drifted away from the illegal part. Intros became more advanced, (mega-)demos (several advanced intros linked together) appeared. The demoscene was born… sort of. A few individuals are still active in both, demoscene and warez/cracking scene.

Also quoted in the article is the explanation of the origin of Demoscene by Jim "Trixter" Leonard, a demoscene activist, in 1994.

Around this time, a gradual shift occurred, from people cracking games to writing graphic/sound demonstrations that showed off the computer they had just learned to program. Sure, cracking games was still popular, but some people decided that learning about the machine and using it as a tool for creativity was cooler” than cracking one dime-store game after another.

Patryk Wasiak's 2012 paper, "'Illegal Guys' A History of Digital Subcultures in Europe during the 1980s" also mentions that the crackdown by the West German police on copy parties organized by software crackers in the late 1980s was an important factor in the shift of more enthusiasts to a legitimate demoscene unrelated to software cracking and piracy.

As described in many articles, after the emergence of demoscene centered on making demos rather than cracking software, enthusiasts in the demoscene distanced themselves from activities that might violate the law, such as cracking and piracy. Nevertheless there are still some cracking groups that have long been active in both the demoscene and the Warez scene, such as Razor 1911, which the U.S. Department of Justice has called "the Oldest Game Software Piracy Ring on the Internet". Razor 1911 has been active from 1985 to the 2010s. Because the group cracked popular commercial software such as Photoshop, it has become more famous in China than even Farbrausch and Future Crew, which are the most famous groups in the demoscene, but which are not involved in software cracking.

In the previous papers, we will find several references to the concept of "crack intro" or "intro", as well as the abbreviation "cracktro" that you may see elsewhere. They all refer to the same thing. Compared to the "crack screen" on the Apple II computer mentioned earlier, the most important feature of the cracktro is that it has animated graphic effects, sometimes with sound effects.

Crack intros showing animated graphics have appeared in the Commodore 64 community since around 1983, and in the 2015 paper "Crack Intros: Piracy, Creativity, and Communication"(Markku Reunanen, 2015) mentioned:

The early C-64 game cracks preserved in the extensive C-64 Scene Database show that the European cracking phenomenon began in West Germany and the Netherlands around 1983. Groups such as the German JEDI and Dutch ABC Crackings included their signatures in game loader screens, often with some correspondence to the original publisher or the author of the game.

The initial crack intros were still relatively rudimentary, with some simply adding a scrolling subtitle introducing the cracker to the game's original splash screen, and some simply showing a static screen, not unlike the previous crack screens on the Apple II. However, throughout the mid-1980s, crack intros gradually developed more and more sophisticated, and after 1985 we could see some teams producing crack intros that gradually added purely technical content that had little to do with cracking the game itself. A famous example is the work of 1001 Crew, which broke the Commodore 64's border limit. Reunanen also mentioned:

One group concentrating heavily on hardware tricks, named the 1001 Crew, was the first to make the whole screen border of the C-64—the broad frame around the display area which normally could not contain anything but a flat color—disappear. The 1001 Crew made it possible to place graphical elements inside the border, literally extending the display capabilities of the C-64 (Amazing, 1001 Crew, 1986; see cdsk ). This discovery was important for the scene, because it encouraged the 1001 Crew to release the production as stand-alone, without a cracked game. The technical stunt empowered the cracker intro to go solo, and to be later called a demo.

A C64.com interview with original 1001 Crew member Joost "Honey" Honig reveals more of the history of the enthusiast community breaking the C64's screen border limitations, in which Joost adds that the 1001 Crew did not implement motion graphics in the middle of the top and bottom borders of the screen. Instead, it was done by another German team called "Flash".

In the crack intros, we can see some of the traditions that have been preserved by the demoscene, such as the "Scroller", a scrolling text banner. If we go through the content of these texts, we can probably see that they resemble some kind of advertisement, in which there are about three types of content.

One type of scroller text is about the software itself, such as the name of the cracked game, the medium in which the software was released, etc. Sometimes crack teams will repackage the floppy version of the software into a cassette tape version, which will also be explained in the subtitles. Another type of text contains greetings to other crack teams, which are a bit like "link exchange" between websites, showing the connection between the crack team that created the intro and the community as a whole, as explained by Reunanen in the paper.

In almost every demo, intro or other product what can be imagined, you can see so-called "greetings." In other words, some person or group is greeting some other person or group. It is nice, because that is one way to improve "friendship." But, big BUT, the "greeting"-lists are usually kind of "cool-groups"-lists. . . . One reason to that "group-greeting" I see is some kind of status-thing. You have to show other people how “cool” contacts you have. And there are swappers who only get contacts to get more groups to their lists.

The third type of scroller text is about the team itself, such as the list of team members, the technical stack of the group members and the technical achievements achieved by their cracking activities, and the BBSes where the group members are active. This brings us to the next topic: How the crackers' community that produced the crack intro developed into an online community.

BBS online community

The last topic discussed in this lesson is online communities. We have already mentioned that some crack groups are active on BBS, and that the popularity of BBSes is the key to the crack intro and subsequent demoscene becoming an important form of online subculture.

BBS was first popular in the United States, and therefore a series of conventions in the BBS world are also from the United States. In 2005, computer historian Jason Scott directed "BBS: The Documentary", which in its fifth episode, "Artscene", introduced the art-making community on BBS, centered around ANSI art.

In our previous media archeology courses, we have shown how dial-up BBS works: through Modem dial-up, the telephone network can connect two computers without the need for Internet infrastructure. No router or other computer network equipment is needed. As long as there is a telephone line and Modem, everyone can log into the BBS site.

ANSI Art works

In the dial-up BBS ecosystem, ANSI Art is an artistic practice centered around the creation of character images. BBS's main function is to post, similar to today's Internet forums, so it is not uncommon to create text as the core of the literary content. The BBS file download area is then an important online community software distribution channel, a significant part of which is cracked by the voluntary piracy (warez) community of pirated software, although in the late 1980s to the early 1990s BBS was also an important field for the distribution of shareware, but the overall BBS and Warez communities are quite closely linked. Until the late 1990s when dial-up BBS gradually faded from view, it was still an important means of distribution of pirated software.

Many of the terms used on BBS are also inherited by the demoscene enthusiasts, such as BBS terminology of calling an account a "handle". Many demo party registration systems provide participants with a field for their "handle", which is the participant's "screen name". In the Cmputer Museum on the Web, there are emulators of important Chinese BBSes in the 1990s, "Beijing Paradise" and "InfoHighway", an early Internet service provider built on BBS technology, both of them have a file sharing area for users to download and upload files to share. This BBS-based online file sharing was the most convenient way to disseminate digital content in the modern sense before the popularity of such Internet.

Therefore, for crack intro, in addition to offline copies through floppy disks, BBS file sharing was also widely popular, especially in the United States, as the United States by many BBS composed of FidoNet is very prosperous, BBS nodes are numerous, both crackers and downloaders are more than happy to publish and obtain software through BBS. But Europe is not as large and unified as the United States long-distance telephone network, so the scene is more dependent on off-line exchange and mail storage media.

Another relatively important thing that has developed from the BBS scene is the NFO file. Often found them in the zip package of the downloaded demos, the NFO is usually a plain text file, which contains information about the demo program or cracked software, such as the producer, hardware and software platform, and so on.

In the paper Online Software Piracy of the Last Millennium (Ben Garrett, 2004), it is mentioned that the earliest NFO file to appear was a 1990 description written by The Humble Guys (THG) team to crack the game Bubble Dragon, which included the name of the crackers Fabulous Furlough, the team's voicemail, and the phone numbers of several BBSes where they were active.

Such a tradition has been preserved to this day, and similar NFO files can still be found in the zip packages of many cracking patchs or keygens today. We can see extensive connections between the software cracking and Warez communities and many computer subcultures, such as ANSI Art, ASCII Art, and, as mentioned in BBS: The Documentary, ASCII Art's predecessor, the radioteletype art(RTTY Art) developed by amateur radio enthusiasts.

The documentary "The Art of Warez" introduces more details about the BBS scene, such as The Draw often used to create ANSI Art back in the era of DOS, as well as "leetspeak", that is, "hacker language," in which the spelling is deformed to produce a different reading experience from the general text, such as writing "e" as "3" (3 is the mirror of capital E), or writing the letter "o" as the number "0", reversing s and z, and so on. According to this rule, "demoscene" can be spelled as "D3m05c3n3", and "Warez" is the leetspeak version of "(Soft)Wares".

The "leet" in "leetspeak" means senior user level "elite" in many BBS systems. Elite users can access all the resources in the BBS, such as discussion forums, file downloads and chat rooms, etc. Elites in BBS are often highly respected computer experts, and the unique way of spelling in leetspeak is actually a symbol of identity. In a way, this practice of alternative spelling as a symbol of identity on the web can be seen as the direct origin of "火星文"(huǒ xīng wén/Martian language).

Introduction to related works

If you are interested in the organization, structure, and communication of subcultural communities, especially those on the Internet, I believe that the Warez scene is a particularly good specimen.

For those interested in further research on Warez communities, there are several books that can serve as references and starting points for research. "Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy", published in 2021, is very new and very systematic in its coverage of all aspects of the Warez community. It is also available as a free electronic download on the punctumbooks website.

Another book worthy of reference for Warez community researchers is "The Pirate Book" which is also available as a free PDF download on the website. This easy to read book illustrates not only the content of the Warez community, but also includes the "Shanzhai" in China, low-budget film production in Malegaon, India and "El Paquete" (a packet of Internet material distributed via portable hard drives) in Cuba, a regional digital culture with a similar ethos or practice to that of Warez.