The “Scene”, when used in this context, is used to describe the underground culture devoted to releasing movies, reverse-engineering and cracking software, and ripping music, and releasing these things on the internet.

Members involved in The Scene are generally well-organized in their behavior and cautious with their identity. They maintain a private network of FTP sites called topsites that get new releases first. Releases are distributed from topsites down to smaller and smaller sites, usually becoming available on public torrent trackers and sites, such as ThePirateBay or MiniNova sooner or later.

Releases containing problems (for example, rips, poor quality, trojans, etc.) are nuked; a permanent mark is placed on a release, and the user responsible for uploading it loses respect in the community. They may also be punished in the form of a ban or fine of “credits” within various topsites.

Competition amongst courier and release groups is the primary driving force behind the distribution of releases. This is because scene rules prohibit releasing duplicate content, and as a result there’s a race to upload a new film or software first, and get more and more respect from the community. This race also results in files being released which have not been checked thoroughly, and

From time to time, a release group will be disbanded, for various reasons including intervention by the authorities. Some well-known cases are “HOODLUM“, who was arrested after releasing “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” first, and more recently, some french groups were stopped.

Read More