I then delved into what is known as “the scene”.   The scene might be the most complex and well run underground operation on the internet of the many many many different deep underground places I’ve been.  I will do my best to describe it, but it is extremely complex.   The scene is essential where 95% of pirated material comes from on the internet.  It is an extremely sophisticated system involving hundreds of people.   Essentially there are private IRC servers, or chat rooms on which piraters talk.  You need complete access as well as a ton of reputation and respect to even get the URL if you will for the server.  You can then connect to the server, which is a very old style chat interface.  You are not in yet, you must message the correct person requesting the correct thing.  These are called “site bots” and they run each “site”.   Each site will have a IRC private chat server, as well as a private channel and a FTP server ring.  FTP is HTTP for downloading, it’s use is for storage of files and transfers.  You will message the bot which will then invite you into the “channel” which is just a private chatroom.  You need to also connect using another program to the sites FTP server where all the pirated files are actually hosted to get the encryption key.  Enter the encryption key from the FTP server back onto the chat room “channel” and random letters and words now form something legible.  To reiterate, the channel is just chat, and the FTP server is the hosting of the files.   There are 10’s if not 100’s of “sites” each with their own private IRC channel as well as private encryption.  Each “site” is made up of multiple servers, some the exact same as the server my father unknowingly bought for my bittorrent uploading.  They are then put in an array as to make one giant server to store all the piracy. A reasonable site would have 10 servers linked together to act as one big server to maximize size and speed.  Within these servers are different sections for different types of piracy, and some sites specialized in certain areas of piracy.   The channels themselves serve only to update on piracy.
The way internet piracy works is there are ‘groups’ which release different pirated goods.  Some might cap and distribute TV shows while another might crack video game cd key protections.  Each member brings something different and together the “release” is done.  Groups tag their release with old school drawings in a notepad like file and also put their group name at the end of the file and folder name.  Now certain releases are highly popular, and different groups race one another to be the first one to successfully release a new pirated work.  Could be a new update to a program, or that nights 2 hour TV finale.   Only one group can release each work, and only if they make an error within the file can another group release the same file regardless of if they lost the race by 2 seconds.  There are strict rules on the releases in terms of size, aspect ratio, resolution, audio ect.  If a release fails to meet the rules, then it is “NUKED” and known as a bad release.   Too many “nukes” and your group will have a bad reputation.   Now each site has groups which post their files directly onto the site.  This means if a group has a brand new movie video taped in a theatre and release it on your site, you are literally one of the first people in the world to have access to this file.  Groups are allowed to download as much as they like as long as the site is happy with their releases.  Now with many different sites and many different groups how can you possibly keep track of everything?   There is another channel in most sites called a “pre” channel.  This is essentially a live, running database of all previous releases in the history of piracy complete with time released and group name.  You can search a release by many variables and check if one is “nuked”, this information is shared across all sites.   No single group is on every site, and the best groups usually were on the fewest possible as security was a top priority in this type of hobby.   This is where “racers” come in.   I raced for a short period of time, and it is the most awe inspiring thing to watch.   Essentially a racer is someone who is on multiple sites, but doesn’t work for a group.  They move the file from one site to another as soon as it is released and get download credits on that site at a ratio of 3:1.   The problem is there are many racers, and releases come out at all hours of the day.   Racers have “scripts” which will idly sit by in the IRC chat “channels” and when the bot announces that something has been released it will automatically open your FTP program and login to two different sites and begin transferring pieces of the file between the servers without the racer ever downloading the file themselves.  This is all done automatically while you are at work, or eating dinner or what have you.  As you can imagine these scripts are extremely tedious and the biggest problem I had was trying to figure out which sites to send from and which to as I had to compete with 10+ people doing the same thing on each site. Not only that but sites have rules for instance one site might have a “no german movies” rule where as the other server is based in germany and gets 10 german movies a day.  A full length movie can be moved between two sites in less than a minute on average.   An example would be on Site A a group releases a new TV show, winning their race.  The site’s bot would announce in chat “group X releases TVSHOW” in the chat “channel”.  The script would then realize this and automatically login to the FTP file server in another program and go directly into the directory where the tv show is and begin to transfer it to the same empty directory on a site that the group doesn’t release on.  As soon as the release is made, the “pre” channel will record it as a new release and testers will quickly check for any errors in your work.  This is how online piracy works.  From these “sites” a release will slowly funnel down until it eventually reaches bittorent and other websites readily available to anyone.   A good movie will go from one private FTP site into 1M downloads worldwide in a day.

I was involved in almost all areas of “the scene” as its referred to.   I had enough respect to get private BNC hosts that would make my ip address come up as dont.trytocatch.me if law enforcement tried to find me.  I had two giant monitors with millions of windows and programs open at all hours of the day and I was viciously abusing the term “unlimited high speed internet”.  I can remember when a group got a hold of a copy of star wars a week early and after spreading it throughout the community I sat down to watch it after burning my copy.  I was still 13 at the time I think and halfway through the movie there was a knock at the door.  It was our internet company, the man asked me if i used the computer and did i know about an extremely high usage of bandwidth in the last few months.   I was maxing out the internet pretty much 24x7 constantly moving files and adding to my pointlessly top 250 movies all time collection I never watched.  I can remember saying “Oh no thats weird, i don’t know much about computers could it be a Trojan or virus?” and then closing the door to scurry back to my pre-release star wars.   I can remember getting the video game Halo 2 months before it came out and having 20 kids from my school at lunch who refused to believe my morning school story that I had it go completely wild.  I think i might have played one match, and to this day i’ve never played it again.   The notoriety i liked.  I liked being “that” dude.  I worked for a small period of time for one of the top groups in piracy of all time.  They were extremely hush hush and wouldn’t release a movie unless it was perfect quality.  They specialized in making very good copies of opening day movies with camcorders and were far above anyone else.  The general practice was to put out whatever you could as fast as you could, but they had been around for a long while, and cared more about quality then quantity.  I never even got a spot on any of their sites despite my work, but i was more than happy to chat and be a part of a big release.   They needed direct audio for their video.  What this means is that when they would use the camcorder in a theatre there would be alot of muffled sounds and general noise throughout the movie, so they wanted perfect audio.   I bought a mp3 player that could record FM radio and got my father to take me to the drive-in movies a few times.  Drive-in was perfect because there was no distortion you could just record the FM station.  I would tune into the FM station and record the audio, get home and upload it to them.  They would then match up the audio and video remotely by just looking at the waves versus mouth movements.  I had my own group for a short while as well, with a few mediocre releases.  I think I spent more time making a cool design for my groups info file then actually releasing anything.   My biggest release was the movie Bloodrayne, I got a Russian copy before it came out in North America on DVD and it had English audio, it was an amazing feeling.  I had the DVD in my hands, i put it in the tray and “ripped” it stripping the protection.  Then encoded it to the “scene rules” to make a small computer video file version of the dvd.   Prepared the release across the 3 sites that my group was on and watched as the file went from being only on my laptop 24 hours ago, to having thousands of google results, and blog posts about my release and millions of torrents downloads as well as spreading like wildfire across many sites.   That was about as big as I got.   I had a scare at one point when i went on vacation and the FBI sent an email to our internet supplier suggesting they stop providing us service due to their own jurisdiction issues, my father wasn’t happy.  I wasn’t sure exactly what they were after me for or how much they knew, but for whatever reason it didn’t faze me much.