A 27-year old computer technician, who had helpfully called himself ?The Pirate?, was running an FTP site filled to the brim with warez, including US$60,000 worth of unlicensed Novell software, plus the now obligatory ?bomb making recipes?. ?He was one of the new breed who advertise on the Internet,? says Kyle. ?He made his files available via email requests? Kyle, impersonating a trader, infiltrated the site, collected evidence, and then handed it over to the Swiss police
The SentinelSuperPro dongle attached to Kinetix 3D Studio Max 2.0, however, was cracked in just under seven days of its retail release by ForceKill of leading hacker group DOD (Drink Or Die).
And every other expensive high-end applications that uses Sentinel ? including NewTek?s Lightwave and Microsoft?s Softimage, and Autodesk?s AutoCAD ? have ended up the same way: cracked, repackaged, and redistributed to every corner of the Internet within days of their release.
http://www.davidmccandless.com/artic...ez_wars_01.htm 
In 1996, the German research institute Frauenhofer-Gesellschaft released a compression technology (codec) which would soon become, with Napster, a buzzword for Internet copyright theft. It?s name was MPEG Layer 3 or MP3 for short. It could compress music into small, CD-quality files, easy to pass around the Internet.
At first, the codec was external, meaning any program could use it. But as Frauenhofer continued to develop and improve on the technology, they made it internal, and confined its use to only officially licensed software.
Prominent audiowarez group, Radium, objected to Frauenhofer?s aggressive protection of their patent and so set their chief hacker IgNorAMUS working to make the codec external again. Robbing the rich to give to the poor. But as he trawled through the thousands of lines of assembly code, he had an amazing realisation ? he could make improvements to the algorithm. After a few flicks of his debugger, he had made a suite of alterations which optimised the codec?s performance, making it run over 12% faster. Radium repackaged the MP3 codec with a proud graph, displaying their codec?s performance over its rival, the original Frauenhofer one. Radium?s codec spread around the world at Net speeds and was used to encode the millions of commercial MP3s files swapped on Napster.
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