Phil's world is full of nasty numbers. Antipiracy
              organizations like the Software Publishers
              Association and Business Software Alliance
              estimate that more than US$5 million worth of
              software is cracked and uploaded daily to the
              Net, where anyone can download it free of
              charge. A running scoreboard on the BSA Web
              site charts the industry's losses to piracy: $482
              a second, $28,900 a minute, $1.7 million an hour,
              $41.6 million a day, $291.5 million a week. A lot
              of that is garden-variety unlicensed copying and
              Far East-style counterfeiting. But an estimated
              one-third leaks out through warez world, which
              can be anywhere there's a computer, a phone, and
              a modem.

              This is bad news for the business. Think of the
              lost revenue! The lost customers! "It's a
              frightening scenario out there," says Martin
              Smith, Novell's product-licensing manager for
              Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. "We are
              seeing a very, very rapid development of crime
              on the Internet."

              He's not being paranoid: look at the thousands of
              messages that pour through
              alt.binaries.warez.ibm-pc and the other Usenet
              sites that are the warez world's pulsing heart.
              In a typical week, you'll see Microsoft Office Pro
              and Visual C++, Autodesk 3D Studio MAX,
              SoftImage 3D, SoundForge, Cakewalk Pro Audio,
              WordPerfect, Adobe Photoshop 4.0 - virtually
              every high-end package in existence. All this
              plus impossibly early betas and alphas. Add a
              smattering of mundane Web tools, Net apps,
              registered shareware, games, and utilities, and
              you have everything for the forward-looking
              computer user.

              Warez world's volumes are impressive, too - a
              good 65 Mbytes a day of freshly cracked, quality
              new releases, chopped into disk-sized portions
              (to make it from one hop to the next without
              clogging the servers), compressed, and uploaded.
              Postings can vary from a few bytes (for a crack)
              to hundreds of megabytes. The nine main warez
              sites alone account for 30 to 40 percent of the
              traffic on Usenet, an average of more than 500
              Mbytes in downloads every 24 hours, according
              to OpNet.

              Bad news indeed for Phil and his friends, gazing
              at those endless dollar signs. But warez world's
              leading citizens say that filthy lucre is beside
              the point - at least for them and the hungry
              collectors they supply.

              "No money ever exchanges hands in our forum,"
              says California Red, one of a half dozen of the
              Mad Hatter's Inner Circle colleagues gathered for
              an IRC chat.

              "We're on the nonprofit side of the warez feeding
              chain," insists another, TAG (The Analog Guy).

              "It's a trade. You give what you have, get
              something you need. No money needed," adds
              Clickety.

              "We're not in it for the money. I would never sell
              something I got from warez," California Red
              reiterates.

              "Never made a dime," says Mad Hatter.

              Even Phil admits these are not the people
              responsible - not directly, anyhow - for the
              500-Mbyte, $50 bundled software CD-ROMs from
              Asia that are the industry's most prominent
              nightmare. Warez crackers, traders, and
              collectors don't pirate software to make a
              living: they pirate software because they can.
              The more the manufacturers harden a product,
              with tricky serial numbers and anticopy
              systems, the more fun it becomes to break.
              Theft? No: it's a game, a pissing contest; a bunch
              of dicks and a ruler. It's a hobby, an act of
              bloodless terrorism. It's "Fuck you, Microsoft."
              It's about having something the other guy
              doesn't. It's about telling him that you have
              something he doesn't and forcing him to trade
              something he has for something you don't.

              In other words, it's an addiction. Listen to a
              typical dialog on an IRC warez trading channel:

              "What you got?"

              "Cubase three."

              "What's that?"

              "A music program."

              "I got it. What else?"

              "No, but it's Cubase three-oh-three - the latest
              bugfix."

              "Shit. Gimme."

              "It's not a patch. It's another seven meg
              download."

              "Don't care. I want it."

              Warez traders scour the newsgroups every night,
              planting requests, downloading file parts they
              don't need. Warezheads feel unfulfilled unless
              they've swelled their coffers by at least one
              application a day. They don't need this Java
              Development Kit tool, or that Photoshop plug-in
              - the thrill is in creating the new subdirectory
              and placing the tightly packed and zipped file
              cleanly, reverently, into the collection. They
              may even install it. Then toy absentmindedly
              with its toolbars and palettes before tucking it
              away and never running it again. 

              Look at Michael, an 18-year-old warez junkie
              who's also into weight lifting. In the evenings,
              while his friends pursue women, he's either at
              the gym or home at his machine, combing the
              planet for the latest dot releases of 3D Studio
              MAX. "I bought a Zip drive so I could store it all.
              The SoftImage rip is 20 disks. It took me three
              months to get the entire set." A directory called
              WAREZ on his D:/ drive has $50,000 worth of
              cracked software, more than any one person
              could ever use, ludicrous amounts of
              applications. The more high-end and
              toolbar-tastic the app, the better. Without
              technical support or manuals, he hasn't a clue
              how to use most of it. But it's there and will
              stay there. "Warez give you a weird kind of
              feeling," he says. "You end up collecting
              programs you don't need and never use. Just so
              you can say, 'I've got this or I've got that.' Or 'My
              version of Photoshop is higher than yours.'"

              Mad Hatter knows the feeling. "It's an obsessive
              game. We see it every day - people begging for
              something to 'finish their collection.'" He's not
              much better himself. "When I was out of work on
              disability, I was totally motivated by the thrill
              of massive uploads, uploading at least 40 Mbytes
              a day for four months straight." Fellow Inner
              Circle member Clickety used to spend 12 hours a
              day online until college got "awful heavy."
              Another, Abraxas, spends 6 to 10 hours online on
              weekdays, 12 to 16 on weekends. But Mad Hatter
              - who runs the semi-tongue-in-cheek,
              semi-poker-faced discussion group
              alt.support.warez.recovery - is making progress:
              he's down to 30 Mbytes a day. "My computer is
              online 24 hours a day," he says. "A warez pirate
              is always online."