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THE HISTORY OF INTERNET PIRACY
(www.youtube.com)
The video talks about some interesting things that many people might not know about the internet piracy, like The Scene and pretty large law enforcement bust of The Scene in 2020.
I think The Scene is hard to understand. It isn't a website or group of websites. The Scene is not publicly accessible at all. The Scene is made up of a bunch of different groups who have all agreed on rules for creating releases. They communicate on IRC and they share files over ftp servers. The files from within the scene are leaked to torrent websites (peer to peer). P2P and The Scene are strictly separate entities. In the early days of torrenting, early to mid 2000s, there was a very harsh rivalry between P2P and The Scene. The Scene was very resentful that scene releases were made public by P2P. The video doesn't mention the rivalry.
A release is called a "pre" and the accompanying release information file is called a "nfo". There is a rule in The Scene that only one release of a given content slot is allowed to exist. Like say you have a movie, The Scene rules permit 3 slots for a BluRay release of a movie: 1080p, 720p and SD. So a group makes a 720p release of a given BluRay disc and if that release meets all of The Scene rules, then no other group is permitted to create the same release. This creates the concept of a race. Groups within The Scene race to be the first to create a release because they put their own groups name on the release. The goal of The Scene is to be fast while maintaining a base level standard of quality.
https://predb.net/ (cw contains names of porn movies) (there's no porn on the website)
There is a sort of public ledger of scene releases called a predb. The link above is an example of a predb. The predb doesn't contain any pirated files, it's just a list of releases from The Scene. You can search for a specific content you want like a movie name or a television show. If you don't have access to The Scene, you can search the scene release on a torrent site and probably find it.
It feels to me that the video is reading from wikipedia, as many video essay makers do. The information that is provided in the video is nearly identical to what the wikipedia page for "The warez scene" says. I think there is some more interesting information of the "talk" page of wikipedia. Some of it is speculation, but given the context of the dates, you can get a general understanding of how The Scene is perceived.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Warez_scene
A key detail that the video glosses over is that before 1976, software was not considered to be protected by copyright at all. The video starts at the year 1976, but doesn't explain why. The video mentions the 1976 copyright act later in the video but doesn't mention the full implications of the act. This is an example of how the concept of property has changed over time. Software created before 1976 was considered to be public domain and freely shareable. In my own opinion, the early piracy scene was motivated by people who had experienced a time where software was freely shareable, legally.
The video contains some minor inaccuracies. When he talks about 56k internet in 1970s/1980s, he makes the claim that it would take "over 9 hours" to download a movie on 56k. I don't know how he got these numbers, "9 hours" seems like a weirdly specific number. 56k means 56 kiloBITS per second. A byte is 8 bits. 56kbps is 7 kiloBYTES per second. 9 hours at 7 kB/s is ~227 MB. I don't know when the scene first released movies, but I don't think it was common in that time period. In the 2000s, it was common for movies to be compress to 700 mb so that they could fit on 1 standard CD disc and the quality was awful. I don't know of any time when movie releases were less than 700 MB. I don't think that The Scene was sharing movies in the 70s or 80s and it would take much longer than 9 hours to share a movie on 56k. The Scene stopped allowing 700 MB movie releases probably 15 years ago. Modern movie releases from The Scene are like 1-2 GB for SD, 5-10 GB for 720p, and 7-15 GB for 1080p.