There’s a well-written and researched article over at Wired Magazine entitled “The Shadow Internet” describing how game and movie pirates operate.
The article describes the pirate supply chain thusly:
Producer (moles employed in the industry or in disc-stamping plants).
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Packager &8594; Distributor &8594; Couriers
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Public
The article also has a description of the security at the so-called topsites, those “thirty or so underground, highly secretive servers where nearly all of the unlicensed music, movies, and videogames available on the Internet originate”:
“The upper reaches of the network are a “darknet,” hidden behind layers of security. The sites use a “bounce” to hide their IP address, and members can log in only from trusted IP addresses already on file. Most transmissions between sites use heavy-duty encryption. Finally, they continually change the usernames and passwords required to log in.”
In traditional supply chains, products flow forward, and money flows backward. What’s interesting is that in pirate networks, no money appears to change hands, and the only things that ‘flows backward’ to the so-called “producer” are the intangibles of respect from peers and self-satisfaction. Most pirates seem to believe that intellectual property should be free and hold the view that they are contributing to the betterment of society by averting a Tragedy of The Commons.
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