



While recent years has witnessed the proliferation of new modes and methods of informal distribution, a certain sector of unauthorized media distribution, namely ‘The Scene’, has been subject to surprisingly little academic consideration. ‘The Scene’ is a collective title for several self-identi ed ‘release groups’ who collaborate to remove copyright protection from media artefacts (e.g. games, software, lms) and repackage them into ‘releases’ for distribution online. Despite assertions that the Scene is the source of ‘most’ pirate copies circulating online, the role these online gatekeepers play in selecting what is ‘released’ into unauthorized online distribution networks has yet to be thoroughly explored. As such, this paper will examine how the practices of The Scene intersect with the wider unauthorized distribution ecology and how they might act as both tastemakers and gatekeepers in an online context that is frequently perceived to be ‘free’, ‘open’ and untroubled by traditional intermediaries. In doing so, the paper will consider how the practices of the Scene are emblematic of the wider processes of re-intermediation that are being felt across the audio-visual industries.




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Release Groups & The Scene: Re-Intermediation and Competitive Gatekeepers Online
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Cinéma & Cie
Virginia Crisp
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Release Groups & The Scene: Re-Intermediation and Competitive Gatekeepers Online
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17
Release Groups & The Scene: Re-Intermediation and
Competitive Gatekeepers Online
Virginia Crisp, King’s College London




Abstract

    While recent years has witnessed the proliferation of new modes and methods
    of informal distribution, a certain sector of unauthorized media distribution,
    namely ‘The Scene’, has been subject to surprisingly little academic consideration.
    ‘The Scene’ is a collective title for several self-identified ‘release groups’ who
    collaborate to remove copyright protection from media artefacts (e.g. games,
    software, films) and repackage them into ‘releases’ for distribution online.
    Despite assertions that the Scene is the source of ‘most’ pirate copies circulating
    online, the role these online gatekeepers play in selecting what is ‘released’ into
    unauthorized online distribution networks has yet to be thoroughly explored.
    As such, this paper will examine how the practices of The Scene intersect with
    the wider unauthorized distribution ecology and how they might act as both
    tastemakers and gatekeepers in an online context that is frequently perceived
    to be ‘free’, ‘open’ and untroubled by traditional intermediaries. In doing so,
    the paper will consider how the practices of the Scene are emblematic of the
    wider processes of re-intermediation that are being felt across the audio-visual
    industries.


   In recent years, the growth of the Internet has enabled the proliferation of new
modes and methods of what Ramon Lobato has called informal distribution.1
That is, actions that facilitate the dissemination of media content outside of
official channels — most commonly referred to as media piracy. This has taken
place over the last twenty years via various distribution outlets, for example:
newsgroups, private filesharing communities, bittorent listing sites (e.g. The
Pirate Bay), Direct Download Link (DDL) sites (e.g. Megaupload), streaming
sites, and filesharing software (e.g. Napster). In this time academia has seen a
concomitant rise in discussions of these new avenues for informal circulation.
However, an aspect of the informal distribution ecosystem that is variously


1
 Ramon Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution (Basingstoke:
BFI Palgrave, 2012).

                                                    Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVII, no. 29, Fall 2017
                                          Virginia Crisp


referred to as the ‘filesharing Scene’, the ‘Warez Scene’ or simply, the ‘Scene’,
has been subject to surprisingly little scrutiny within these academic discussions
of media piracy. Indeed, the Scene is, according to Décary-Hétu, Morselli and
Leman-Langois, the least academically researched hacker community.2 This is
despite the existence of numerous claims about the reach and influence of the
Scene.3 As such, this article seeks to redress this lack of research by interrogating:
1) what exactly the Scene is, and 2) how the practices of the Scene intersect
with the wider online informal distribution ecology. In doing so, this article
will demonstrate how the Scene play a significant role in gatekeeping access to
cultural goods within the online informal distribution ecology.
   In order to explore these questions, this work will refer to both existing
academic literature regarding the Scene and my own experience of studying
informal online distribution over the last decade.4 In order to examine the nature
and structure of the Scene, this paper will also draw upon data gathered from the
website scenerules.org, which provides a repository of Scene rules from 1996 to
the present. This examination will be, in part, used to demonstrate that while the
broader ‘Scene’ operates across mediums, it is actually made up of varying sub-
scenes that concern themselves with different mediums and formats and operate
according to different rules and standards.
   The way practices of the Scene intersect with the wider online informal
distribution ecology and how these interactions ultimately position the Scene as
gatekeepers of online distribution, will be illustrated through my own model of
the informal distribution ecology. This model will illustrate how the gatekeeping
position of the Scene is secured because of the pivotal role it plays in controlling


2
  David Décary-Hétu, Carlo Morselli and Stéphane Leman-Langois, ‘Welcome to the Scene: A
Study of Social Organization and Recognition among Warez Hackers’, Journal of Research in
Crime and Delinquency, 49.3 (2012), 359–82 (p. 361).
3
  See Maria Eriksson, ‘A different Kind of Story: Tracing the Histories and Cultural Marks of Pirate
Copied Film’, Technoscienza: Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies, 7.1 (2016), 87–108
(p. 92); Ard Huizing and Jan van der Wal, ‘Explaining the Rise and Fall of the Warez MP3 Scene:
An Empirical Account from the Inside’, First Monday, 19.10 (2014), <http://firstmonday.org/
ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/- 5546/4125> [accessed 11 November 2016]; and Alf Rehn, ‘The
Politics of Contraband: The Honor Economies of the Warez Scene’, Journal of Socio-Economics,
33.3 (2004), 359–74 (p. 365).
4
  See Virginia Crisp, ‘Access and Power: Film Distribution, Re-intermediation and Piracy’, in The
Routledge Companion to the World Cinema, ed. by Rob Stone, Paul Cooke, Stephanie Dennison and
others (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 445–54; Virginia Crisp, ‘Pirates and Proprietary Rights:
Perceptions of “Ownership” and Media Objects within Filesharing Communities’ in Cult Media:
Re-packaged, Re-released and Restored, ed. by Andy Willis and Jonathan Wroot (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2017), pp. 125–41; Virginia Crisp, Film Distribution in the Digital Age: Pirates and
Professionals (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015); Virginia Crisp, ‘To Name A Thief: Constructing
the Deviant Pirate’, in Piracy: Leakages from Modernity, ed. by Martin Fredriksson and James
Arvanitakis (Los Angeles, CA: Litwin Books, 2014), pp. 39–54; Virginia Crisp, ‘The Piratical
is Political: Why We Should All (Still) Pay Attention to Debates about Piracy’, Soundings, 55
(Autumn 2013), pp. 71–80; Virginia Crisp, ‘BLOODY PIRATES!!! *shakes fist*’: Re-imagining
East Asian Film Distribution & Reception through Online Filesharing Networks’, Journal of
Japanese and Korean Cinema, 3.1 (2012), 65–72.

68
    Release Groups & The Scene: Re-Intermediation and Competitive Gatekeepers Online


media supply to the aforementioned distribution outlets: newsgroups, private
filesharing communities, tracker sites, DDL sites, streaming sites and filesharing
software. However, it should be noted that because the structure and operations
of online informal distribution practices vary between mediums, it has been
necessary to use one medium, film, as the focus for the model. This is because
it was deemed that a single model attempting to capture the interactions within
the online informal distribution across mediums would become too complex to
helpfully illustrate the key role that the Scene plays within this ecosystem. This
article will begin with a discussion of what the Scene is and how it operates
before presenting the aforementioned model illustrating how the Scene interacts
with other aspects of informal online distribution of films.


What is The Scene?

    Décary-Hétu, Morselli and Leman-Langois suggest that ‘[w]hile it is true that
some of the warez [files circulated informally online] come from individuals who
have shared their personal collections, current research on the phenomenon
has shown that there exists a community of hackers who are specializing in the
removal of copy-protection schemes and distribution of copyrighted material’.5
Thus, the ‘Scene’, often written in title case and/or with inverted commas,
has become a collective title for numerous self-identified ‘release groups’
who remove copyright protection from media artefacts (e.g. games, software,
films) and repackage them into ‘releases’ for distribution online. According to
Eriksson, these ‘“release groups” […] who assemble under the umbrella grid of
the “scene” [represent] a highly diverse underground sphere from which most
pirate copies originate’.6
    Huizing and van der Wal, suggest that pirate ‘scenes’ (in the plural) first
developed in the 1980s and (at this point) these scenes were primarily concerned
with the informal distribution of computer software and games.7 These scenes
originally evolved because the process of online informal distribution was,
and in some cases still is, expensive and laborious and thus collaborating with
others enabled copyright protected content to be circumvented and files to be
circulated with greater speed and ease. As Huizing and van der Wal suggest,
‘In the early days of the MP3 scene, ripping, releasing and distributing a MP3
file was a time–consuming and knowledgeable activity, prone to mistakes and
duplicate work that required a joint effort of many different sceners.’8 While the
situation is arguably very different now, especially in relation to MP3 circulation,
the early costs in terms of money, time and experience explain why a scene


5
  Décary-Hétu, Morselli and Leman-Langois, p. 360.
6
  Eriksson, p. 92.
7
  Huizing and van der Wal, p 10.
8
  Huizing and van der Wal, p. 4.

                                                                                       69
                                        Virginia Crisp


developed around online piracy where people collaborated in order to release
certain materials.


Scenes within the Scene

   However, from these early beginnings, these scenes became what Huizing
and van der Wal have referred to as a ‘global microstructure’, that is, ‘forms of
connectivity and coordination that combine global reach with microstructural
mechanisms that instantiate self-organizing principles and patterns’.9 In this way,
they suggest, ‘the MP3 scene soon developed into the primary provider of most
pirated artefacts on the Internet.’10 Within the Scene’s microstructure there are
innumerable release groups and each of these groups tends to specialise in a
particular medium, format and/or genre. So, one might have release groups that
variously specialise in Kung-Fu Blu-rays or Vinyl RnB. Décary-Hétu, Morselli and
Leman-Langois suggest that overall these release groups ‘work and compete in a
very distributed and democratic community where we are unable to identify clear
leaders’.11 However, while the Scene overall is distributed and de-centralised, the
release groups within it are ‘hierarchical, highly-structured organisations with
leadership positions that control day-to-day operations, recruit new members
and manage the group’s various computer archive sites’.12 Thus, on the one hand,
the Scene is highly organised because it operates with its own rules and standards
(which will be examined in more detail later in this article) but on the other
hand ‘a large proportion of release groups are short lived’ and ‘no actor or actors
significantly dominate [the overall] network’.13
   As well as the release groups that make up the Scene, it is important to note
that the blanket term ‘the Scene’ includes the varying scenes that specialise in
the redistribution of software, films, music, audiobooks and other media and
thus, there are numerous sub-scenes within this larger structure. These scenes are
related in that, they are all concerned with informal distribution, they are all made
up of smaller release groups, and each scene has its own rules and conventions
(which have commonalities but are nonetheless distinct). Furthermore, the portals
through which others might access each scene’s releases may converge (e.g. one
might download both music and films via the same filesharing software or DDL
sites) although this is not always the case. However, due to specialisation within
scenes and release groups, there is not necessarily an actual overlap between
people who are members of each scene. Such a situation might be likened to


9
  Huizing and van der Wal, p. 1.
10
   Ibidem.
11
   Décary-Hétu, Morselli and Leman-Langois, p. 360.
12
   Peggy E. Chaudhry, ‘The Looming Shadow of Illicit Trade on the Internet’, Business Horizons,
60.1 (2017), 77–89 (p. 83).
13
   Décary-Hétu, Morselli and Leman-Langois, p. 371.

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     Release Groups & The Scene: Re-Intermediation and Competitive Gatekeepers Online


when a city has a thriving live music scene but the gigs and performances within
that wider scene, and thus the audiences, would likely differ. For instance, it
is unlikely that those who perform at RnB club nights would be the same as
those participating in singer songwriter folk jams but they are nonetheless still
connected by their status as music performers within the same geographical
location — and thus the same live music scene. In a similar manner, the Scene
has no centre, it is full of contradictions, and its boundaries are far from clear.
   In order to delineate this interconnected yet decentralised Scene, the following
section will examine the repository of information regarding Scene rules across
mediums and formats provided on scenerules.org in order to demonstrate just
how many different factions operate within the Scene and their multiple attempts
to standardise their decentralised practises.
   The website scenerules.org presents numerous sets of rules that have been
devised by one or more release groups in an effort to standardise how their
scene creates and distributes ‘releases’. For instance, ‘The 2014 Complete Bluray
Releasing Standards’ signed by release groups: BAKED, BDA, CiNEMATiC,
GMB, Japhson, LAZERS, NOSCREENS, o0o, PCH, & SEMTEX, provide
specific guidelines on how releases should be packaged and tagged named as
well as general rules specifying that releases must be region free, that all copy
protection should be removed and that watermarks should not be used by release
groups. Their rules regarding packaging are as follows:

       P1)   Sample, nfo and sfv are required for each release.
       P2)   NFO must contain at least:
       –     IMDB link
       –     Bluray Region
       –     Audio streams
       –     Subtitle streams
       P3)   Rar’s must be split into 250 or 500 MB archives.
       P4)   Passwords or encryption is not tolerated.
       P5)   Compression is not allowed.14

  As the text above illustrates, these rules are clear and specific and language
such as ‘is not allowed’ or ‘is not tolerated’ implies these rules will be actively
policed by the release groups who are signatories to the rules.
  The site categorises the rules they make available under headings of ‘Current
English Rules’, ‘Ye Olde English Rules’ and ‘Non-English Rules’. The multiple
rule sets are available to view in picture, text or numbered formats or as
downloadable .NFO15 files. Non-English Rules are categorised under Baltic,
Danish, Dutch, Flemish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian,

14
   The 2014 Complete Bluray Standards <https://scenerules.org/n.html?id=2014_BLURAY.nfo/>
[accessed 23 October, 2017].
15
   The term NFO refers to ‘text files that are attached to digital pirate copies, and offer additional
information about them’. See Eriksson, p. 94.

                                                                                                   71
                                          Virginia Crisp


Polish, Spanish and Swedish headings. The Baltic, Danish and Flemish headings
only contain one or two sets of rules each whereas, in contrast, the German
section has forty separate sets of rules that relate to different mediums (ebooks,
TV, scripts) as well as different input (Bluray, TV) and output (DVDR, XViD,
Divx) formats. Some of the non-English rules date back to 2001 while others
are as recent as 2017. The ‘Ye Olde English Rules’ are split by input and output
format (e.g. Audiobook, FLAC, PS3 etc.) with certain categories (DVDR, Games,
MDVDR, MP3, MVID, TV, X264, Xbox 360 and XViD) having more than one
set of rules. This section has a total of 125 different sets of rules recorded.16 There
is also an extra ‘0 Day’ section which lists rules for software that is ‘released’ on
the same day as the official release. The earliest set of rules within the ‘Ye Olde’
section has MP3 rules dating back to 1996. The ‘Current English Rules’ section
represents a consolidation of the earlier rules into forty-two rule sets that are
split by format/medium but in this case, there are no longer multiple rules sets
for a single format/medium and these rules are presented as the current sets to
be followed by Scene release groups.
   In total, scenerules.org provides details of two hundred and seventy-seven
separate rule sets over multiple mediums and formats. Rules are provided for
anything from press books, album covers and audiobooks to PS3 and Wii-U
games. Furthermore, each rule set points to a number of release groups that
have devised and ‘signed’ those rules as well as implying the existence of
numerous other groups who will adhere to the rules without being signatories.
Such a plethora of different rule sets and release groups points to a markedly
decentralised and fluid organisational structure, which, scholars such as
Rehn have noted, mean that ‘the scene cannot be said to exist in anything
except a virtual sense. Participants only rarely meet in person, and in most
cases know each other solely as “network identities” [...]. It is, in all senses, a
virtual, distributed society’.17 While the existence on so may rules points to an
element of self-regularisation, Eriksson suggests that this apparent organisation
really amounts to little more than ‘an untidy bureaucratic framework for the
production of digital pirate copies’.18
   Furthermore, while the Scene is dedicated to practices of online piracy, it is,
perhaps counterintuitively, staunchly opposed to peer-to-peer filesharing listing
websites like The Pirate Bay who frequently circulate Scene materials. As Andrew
Whelan suggests:

         Warez groups consider p2p users to be leeches jeopardising their own activity —
     at the same time that they are dependent on p2p users to spread their name alongside
     the releases they (re)produce. The sources of much of the content on p2p are actively


16
   It should be noted that two of these records are marked as potentially fake as they are unsigned
by the named release groups.
17
   Rehn, p. 364.
18
   Eriksson, p. 96.

72
      Release Groups & The Scene: Re-Intermediation and Competitive Gatekeepers Online


     opposed to the distribution of that content; the warez scene attitude towards p2p is
     not all that different from that of the RIAA.19

   So, while the files from the Scene ‘simmer out to the general public through
websites and similar avenues, the community itself is rather closed and abides
by its own logic’.20 This is further illustrated by a 2009 article on the filesharing
news site TorrentFreak which reports that while being questioned during a
court case, one of the co-founders of the Pirate Bay, Gottfird Svartholm (AKA
Anakata), explained that, ‘so-called warez groups […] hate the Pirate Bay
[because] they like to keep their releases within a selective group of people’.21
Despite this wish to stay selective and keep their warez circulating within their
own sharing sites and closed communities, Scene releases do seep out of the
confines of these spaces and it is the influence of these leakages that will be
illustrated in the model of the online informal distribution ecology outlined
later in this article.
   Having examined the dispersed and contradictory nature of the Scene, this
article will now begin to examine how these Scene(s) function through a closer
examination of what some of these Scene rules are as well as how they have been
developed and formalised.


Scene Releasing: Standards, Practices & Policing

   Drawing from Huizing and van der Wal22 and Rehn23, the process of Scene
releasing can be distilled into the following stages: firstly, a release group
sources a copy of the film, album or piece of software they wish to share. These
copies might be provided by industry insiders or the release might be copied
from a legitimate purchase. Next, the release group checks the Scene database
to make sure the group is not about the make a duplicate of an existing Scene
release. After this, this source file is ‘ripped’ from its original version and
copyright protection is also thus removed. This ‘rip’ must adhere to certain
Scene rules that dictate the way the ‘release’ must be ‘packaged’. For instance,
Scene rules dictate how the file will be named and what other information
must accompany each release. This normally consists of providing up to date
metadata (e.g. MP3 tags), ‘applying a Simple File Verification (.SFV) to verify


19
   Andrew Whelan, ‘Leeching Bataille: Peer-to-Peer Potlatch and the Acephalic Response’, in 4th
Inclusiva-net Meeting: P2P Networks and Processes, ed. by J. Prada (Madrid: Medialab Prado,
2009), pp. 1–15 (p. 6).
20
   Rehn, p. 363.
21
   Ernesto, ‘Anakata Explains in Court How “The Scene” Works’, TorrentFreak, 20 February 2009
<https://torrentfreak.com/anakata-explains-in-court-how-the-scene-works-090220/> [accessed
11 November 2016].
22
   Huizing and van der Wal.
23
   Rehn.

                                                                                            73
                                    Virginia Crisp


the file’s integrity and including a .NFO file for contact details and credits’ for
the release group.24
   Release standards for Scene rips of films first came to the fore when Team
Div/X aka DVX published their guidelines25 and early MP3 releases were
standardised by the rather grandly titled MP3 Council. When examining these
early release standards, Eriksson notes how these standards for film dictated
‘a minimum resolution and bitrate, a maximum file size’ alongside guidance
for producing ‘so-called .NFO-files to pirate copied films’ as well as specifying
naming conventions.26 In music the situation was similar, with requirements
to encode at a certain bitrate, use an ‘approved MP3 encoder’ and provide an
.NFO file, which needed to contain information about the release group. The
creation of the DVX group rules was followed by a proliferation of alternative
release standards. According to information on scenerules.org that was last
updated in February 2017, forty-two release standards are still currently in use
and many more previous standards have faded into obscurity.27
   These rules thus demonstrate how the Scene is not confined to particular me-
diums or formats but that these subdivisions have their own specific regulations.
That said, a common convention to all rule sets is the requirement that the name
of the released file includes the name of the release group, as illustrated by the Of-
ficial FLAC Standard Rules v3.0, which state that a ‘[r]elease name MUST con-
tain at least: Artist, Title, Source, Year, Group’.28 Thus, far from eschewing noto-
riety due to the illegality of their activities, such naming conventions point to the
way release groups are required to mark releases as their own work.
   Thus, release standards, as well as representing the Scene’s own practices of
self-regulation, also act as ‘competitive yardsticks’ against which pirate materials
might be judged and valued; thus engendering a culture of competition amongst
release groups.29 Rehn has suggested that this competition focus within the
Scene means that what is released becomes secondary to the perceived speed
and technical ability of the release groups.30 As he claims, ‘by and large, the
specifics of what is released are less important than the act of releasing itself.’31
Significantly, motivations for participating in the Scene are generally held to be
reputational rather than monetary. In this context, preparing a release ‘before
another group’ becomes particular respected and so ‘[g]roups will cooperate
when it comes to the upkeep of the community’s infrastructure (servers and



24
   Huizing and van der Wal, p. 4.
25
   See the Scenerules website <https://scenerules.org/> [accessed 29 July 2017]
26
   Eriksson, p. 94.
27
   Scenerules <https://scenerules.org/> [accessed 29 July 2017]
28
    Official FLAC Standard Rules v3.0 <https://scenerules.org/n.html?id=2016_FLAC.nfo>
[accessed 23 October 2017]
29
   Erikkson, p. 93.
30
   Rehn, p. 368.
31
   Rehn, p. 366.

74
     Release Groups & The Scene: Re-Intermediation and Competitive Gatekeepers Online


connections), but compete in the production and distribution of products within
this infrastructure’.32
   Furthermore, ‘these rule sets have a significant impact on how digital pirate
copies are shaped, formed, and packaged — and also how they later come to
circulate in the world […]. Much like quality ensuring mechanisms within the
market economy, they [release standards] help to separate grain from husk and
thus exert power over the future movements of digital pirate copied objects’.33
This is because the ‘rules’ dictate certain norms of behaviour. For instance, a
notable aspect of the DVX rules is an emphasis on only releasing new titles. Such
a rule inevitably skews the titles that circulate online.
   After the release has been packaged according to Scene rules it will be uploaded
to a Scene server — commonly called a topsite. At this point further checking
for duplicates would take place. Again, specific rules exist about duplicates and
crediting the work of other release groups. For instance, once a product is released
by one group is cannot be redistributed without crediting the initial group or the
duplicating group may be expelled from the Scene.34 Due to the aforementioned
organisational structure of the Scene, while a particular group or individual
might be banded, there is potentially little to stop the group producing releases
under another name or for the group’s members joining or forming other groups.
However, if found, duplicates are ‘nuked’ (i.e. deleted) from Scene servers and
thus release groups have little incentive to duplicate releases. After this final
duplicate check, the ‘release’ is distributed on servers affiliated with the Scene
before being sent out to non-affiliated servers by couriers.


The Scene and the Informal Online Distribution Ecology

   This elucidation of Scene release processes should now serve as a baseline
from which to consider how the Scene might fit within the wider informal online
distribution ecology. To examine this question, Huizing and van der Wal’s model
for informal online distribution activities will be considered. This model suggests
that the Scene exists separately to private torrents, newsgroups and peer-to-peer
networks and that those within the Scene typically spend more time distributing
content online than those in other categories (fig. 1).35
   Huizing and van der Wal’s model is also designed to reflect their argument
that Sceners ‘collaborated in groups with a strong sense of We-ness’;36 in other
words, collaborative behaviour is prized and there is an emphasis on community


32
   Rehn, p. 367.
33
   Eriksson, p. 96.
34
   David Décary-Hétu, ‘Police Operations 3.0: On the Impact and Policy Implications of Police
Operations on the Warez Scene’, Policy and Internet, 6.3 (2014), 315–40 (p. 318).
35
   Huizing and van der Wal, p. 8.
36
   Huizing and van der Wal, p. 7.

                                                                                          75
                                           Virginia Crisp




         Fig. 1. Huizing and van der Wal’s model for informal online distribution activities.


engagement and furthering the mutually shared goal of distributing content
online. This ‘we-ness’ exists, Huizing and van der Wal suggest, in contrast to
Private torrents, newsgroups and peer-to-peer networks, within which there is
an emphasis on downloading rather than uploading.37 However, arguably this
model is only useful to the extent that it indicates that the Scene is somewhat
collaborative and that it has a much smaller user base than peer-to-peer networks.
Furthermore, this model does little to illustrate the relationships between these
informal distribution groups. To address these issues and to illustrate the
relationship between the Scene and other aspects of the informal distribution
ecology the following model is proposed (fig. 2).
    This model is designed to communicate: firstly, the multiple sources for the
releases that circulate online as well as the relatively small number of distributors
who select and package them; secondly, the relationship between the Scene and
other informal online distributors; and thirdly, the interactions between informal
online distributors and various access portals, e.g. torrent listing websites and
filesharing software. As was noted in the introduction, the informal distribution
of film alone has been used as an example medium to illustrate the various
sources of these original files but similar lists could be complied for other media.
    The top part of the diagram perhaps requires the least explanation and
illustrates that pirate copies originate from both formal (streaming, home
video, TV, cinema, non-theatrical) and informal (screeners, work prints, pirate
copies) sources. The distributors level of the diagram (the Scene, Intermediary
Distributors, Autonomous Distributors), on the other hand, requires further
elucidation.
    These categorisations are drawn from distinctions made in previous work
between ‘informal online distributors’ who operate within Scene release groups
(labelled in fig. 2 as ‘The Scene’), ‘intermediary distributors’ who circulate

37
     Ibidem.

76
     Release Groups & The Scene: Re-Intermediation and Competitive Gatekeepers Online




     Fig. 2. A model of the relationship between the Scene and other aspects of the informal
                                       distribution ecology.


Scene releases through non-Scene networks, and ‘autonomous distributors’ who
prepare releases for specific communities/platforms without being affiliated
to the Scene or necessarily following Scene conventions.38 A sub-set of these
autonomous distributors might be understood as what Hinduja has described
as ‘amateur distributors’, i.e. ‘individuals who randomly upload copyrighted
content on peer-to-peer networks’.39 That is, these individuals might have files
on their computer that they have ripped themselves and by virtue of storing
them in certain folders on their hard-drive and using certain software they are
incidentally ‘sharing’ the files, but they did not consciously decide to rip the files
for such a purpose.40 This amateur activity is less deliberate and purposeful that

38
   Crisp, Film Distribution in the Digital Age.
39
   Sameer Hinduja, ‘Neutralization Theory and Online Software Piracy: An Empirical Analysis’,
Ethics and Information Technology, 9.3 (2007), 187–204, cited in Décary-Hétu, Morselli and
Leman-Langois, p. 363.
40
   This form of amateur distribution is most common with music due to the relative technical
simplicity of the conversion process from CD to MP3 in comparison to film, software or games
which typically require specialist technical knowledge and software in order to circumvent
copyright protection and extract files from a particular format (e.g. a Blu-ray disk) and to convert
the files into another format (e.g. .avi).

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                                           Virginia Crisp


the actions of autonomous distributors who operate in a similar way to release
groups but who also tend to work individually, prepare releases for specific
communities, and do not necessarily adhere to set release standards.
   Scene release groups, autonomous distributors and amateur distributors
are all ‘distributors’ in as much as they are adding to the pool of films available
through filesharing networks as opposed to simply circulating files that were
already there. The exception to this is the category of ‘intermediary’ distributors
which, as mentioned, involves the purposeful act of sharing of Scene releases
within specific communities (and thus an element of choice and acquisition takes
place) but the release itself, while being more widely distributed by the actions
of the intermediary distributor, is not broadening the library of files available
through informal online channels.
   Finally, and most significantly, the diagram illustrates the way files flow from
distributors to access portals (private filesharing communities, torrent listing
websites, filesharing software, direct download link [DDL] listing websites,
streaming sites & newsgroups) and between those different portals and the key
role that the Scene plays in feedings all of those access points. The access portals
identified here are mechanisms through which ‘warez’ can be downloaded
by consumers. These vary in terms of their histories and current usage.41
Newsgroups, for instance, were very popular during the early days of informal
online distribution but have arguably waned in significance at the time of writing
this article.42 Torrent listing websites, e.g. The Pirate Bay, are in some senses
still very popular but they are also the more high-profile of the access portals
and thus tend to exist in a cycle of being shut down by authorities before being
relocated, then they are shut down again, and relocated again, and the cycle
continues. What is significant in the diagram is not the existence of these multiple
portals but the interactions between these access points. For instance, filesharing
software and newsgroups tend to be endpoints where files are distributed having
been sourced from elsewhere. Direct download link (DDL) and torrent listing
websites reciprocally feed each other while private torrent communities tend to
be somewhat disconnected from the rest of the informal ecology.


Conclusion

   While the breath of Scene practices and their intersections with the broader
informal online distribution ecology could not be comprehensibly covered within
this article, two important conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, as illustrated by the
model outlined in this article, the Scene plays a pivotal role in feeding all of the
access points within the informal distribution ecology, reflecting the assertions


41
   These variations cannot be dealt with sufficiently within the confines of this article, see Crisp,
Film Distribution in the Digital Age, for a more detailed history.
42
   With the exception, perhaps, of Usenet which continues to have a dedicated user base.

78
     Release Groups & The Scene: Re-Intermediation and Competitive Gatekeepers Online


of Eriksson,43 Huizing and van der Wal,44 Rehn,45 Décary-Hétu, Décary-Hétu,
Morselli and Leman-Langois46 that the Scene is the source of ‘most’ pirate copies
circulating online. In this context, the role these online gatekeepers play in
selecting what is ‘released’ into unauthorized online distribution networks needs
to be more thoroughly explored.
   Secondly, we need to be particularly concerned about the influential gatekeeping
role that the Scene plays within informal online distribution networks and, as
such, the role of rules and release standards in influencing what the Scene releases
requires greater scrutiny. These release standards arguably foster a defining logic
of competition within the Scene and, as such, the particulars and use value of
what these release groups actually, crack/rip/release/package and circulate has
the potential to become almost irrelevant. So ‘[a]lthough a release is expected to
function (in fact this is necessary for a release to count in the internal system of
appraisal), whether or not it is actually used for anything is of little or no interest
to how the release is valued within the community’.47 In this manner the Scene
is a community engaged in ‘conspicuous production’48 (where the monetary,
aesthetic or use value of what they circulate is of limited internal relevance) and
thus the role it plays in controlling the pipeline of content to the rest of the
informal distribution ecology must be examined in more detail.




43
   Eriksson, p. 92.
44
   Huizing and van der Wal, p. 1.
45
   Rehn, p. 365.
46
   Décary-Hétu, Morselli and Leman-Langois, p. 363
47
   Rehn, p. 368.
48
   Rehn, p. 370.

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