> There was an article posted here a while ago that talked about this "scene vs p2p" dynamic, but presupposed the audience knew what "the scene" was. I'm still confused as to what it refers, is "the scene" just private file sharing / piracy?

No, the scene refers to a specific group of individuals who are the source of almost all pirated material on the internet. There's some info on Wikipedia[0], but the article's not very good (some on the talk page say that's because of deliberate vandalism on the part of sceners to prevent knowledge about it from spreading). The way I see it, the defining principles of the scene are:

1. Very strict rules in terms of quality and release format/naming. Scene councils made up of members from the biggest groups in each release category convene on a regular basis (once a year, I believe) to decide on whether standards for different release categories (MP3, DVDRIP, APPS) need to be updated/modified and then release the new rules in the form of a scene notice.

2. Extreme paranoia. It's extremely difficult for someone to get into the scene if they don't know someone IRL who's already in it, particularly if they don't have something to offer, whether it be source material, servers/hardware for storing/spreading the material, or technical skills (most important for cracking software).

3. Lack of any websites. I think some scene groups had websites back in the day, but for security reasons they now operate solely on private IRC channels (I think mostly on EFnet and LinkNet these days, but I'm not sure. The groups that have enough hardware probably run their own IRC servers for added security). All file transfers are done via FTP.

4. The scene is highly decentralized, and the closest you get to any leadership are the scene councils mentioned above.

5. Data spreads very quickly (literally in seconds) because of the high speed servers that they have (these can be either legally owned or hacked servers - higher up in the scene, they tend to have legally owned servers to ensure reliability). They have "autotrading scripts" that automatically "race" releases from one server to another. The data moves down into lower tiers very quickly through the work of "couriers", whose incentive to do this is that they get credit for uploading data to a server, which they then use to download stuff from that server themselves. Much like on private torrent sites, they're expected to keep their "ratio" of uploaded data to downloaded data above a certain value. They use a protocol called FXP, which basically allows them to connect to 2 FTP servers and negotiate a transfer of files from one server to the other.

6. There can only be one release of a particular copyrighted work (whether it be an music album, movie, TV episode, etc.). In some cases there are multiple releases in different formats (like standard def and high def for movies and TV shows), but in other cases there aren't (music is only released in MP3, no OGG or FLAC or anything). Whichever scene group releases first wins the race, so there is a lot of competition for speed. However, loss of quality from trying to be the first to release is mitigated by the fact that if a release is bad it can be "nuked", meaning the scene group loses credit for the release and another group has a chance to release a "proper", which is essentially the same release, except done correctly.

7. Virtually everyone does it for fun (for the thrill), not for money.

There's some more stuff in these[1,4] Wired articles, and they're moderately accurate. There have been two video productions[2,3] on this topic as well, but they're both rather inaccurate and cheesy in my opinion. In fact, a parody of the first aforementioned video production was also created[13-20]. For a more individual perspective, there are these[5,6,7] Reddit threads.

You can also watch scene releases as they're released in real time at any of these[8,9,10,11] sites. The traditional method of viewing scene releases is via a "pre channel", an IRC channel that has a bot that announces the releases in real time and has a database of old releases that can be searched (a "pre db"), but most pre channels are invite only and the web format is more accessible anyway. This[12] article mentions a pre channel run by a private torrent tracker that's open to the public, but the article's kind of old, so I don't know if it's still available.

Hope that answers your question ;)

> Also, wintermute - great username. Had a momentary "that's familiar..." before it clicked.

Haha, thanks. Neuromancer's one of my favorite books.

Links:

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_scene

1: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/topsite_pr.html

2: http://www.welcometothescene.com/download.php

3: http://vimeo.com/2561685

4: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.04/ff_warez_pr.html

5: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ctil4/hey_reddit_...

6: http://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/ctkae/i_was_a_pioneer_o...

7: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ctmpj/iama_former_scen...

8: http://pre.scenedb.org/

9: http://predb.in/

10: http://www.vcdq.com/

11: http://www.orlydb.com/

12: http://filenetworks.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-public-irc-pre-...

13: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8136171800707655105#

14: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7123184812720063468#

15: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2273515260483979086#

16: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7663511882469796626#

17: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2238685629943246399...

18: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1331694120891185632...

19: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5641163267370703912#

20: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6867553833982382452...