In the early hours of July 6, Jenny, head of a software piracy ring based in the Pacific Northwest, paced impatiently in front of a rack of high-speed personal computers, waiting for the phone call that would make her a superstar in the pirate underground.
It would come from an employee of LucasArts Entertainment Co. in San Raphael, Calif., who for $300 would supply Jenny's pirate group with one of the most anticipated games of summer: "TIE Fighter," based on the "Star Wars" movie trilogy and priced at about $60 per copy.
At LucasArts, the employee attached a small cellular modem to the back of his PC -- a technique that would keep any record of the call off the company telephone bill -- and dialed. Within a few minutes, the program had arrived in Jenny's computer, lacking only the code keys that would make it possible to play the game without an owner's manual.
Jenny then dialed into the Internet, the global computer network, and after taking several deliberate electronic detours, she connected with a small computer in Moscow.
There, a programming whiz who goes by the name "Skipjack" quickly cracked the codes and sent the program back across the Internet to "Waves of Warez," a Seattle bulletin board popular with pirates.
Within 24 hours, "TIE Fighter" would be available to thousands of software pirates in major cities around the world -- days before its official release date of July 20.
Welcome to the underside of the Internet, where stealing software has become highly sophisticated and hotly competitive -- pursued more for thrills than for money. It's a world where pirate groups build alliances, undertake mergers and sometimes launch all-out battles against rivals.
And, contrary to common stereotypes, it is populated not only by nerdy teen-age misfits, but by a curious cross-section of computer enthusiasts looking for some dangerous fun.
Jenny, for example, is a woman whose hobbies include motorcycles and collecting rare birds. The head of a big East Coast-based ring is a commercial airline pilot. Another group leader is a junior studying chemical engineering at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Yet another is a grandmother, leader of an elite group called Nokturnal Trading Alliance.
Their activities are, of course, illegal, potential felonies in many cases. To most denizens of cyberspace, who use the Internet for scientific research, legitimate commerce and legal forms of entertain- ment, the pirates are common vandals at best.
Still, a number of pirates agreed to allow a reporter to observe their operations -- both in person and via computer techniques that make it possible to monitor computer activities remotely -- on the condition their identities be concealed.
Economic impact
The economic impact of the pirates' activities is difficult to measure. Electronic software theft via the Internet and other on-line services accounts for about one-third of the $2.2 billion lost in the United States last year as a result of piracy, according to the Business Software Alliance, a trade group. Pirates who mass-produce CD-ROM and floppy disks with stolen software pose a much bigger problem.
But Internet software theft is growing rapidly, along with the global network itself. Even major, mainstream programs -- such as the new version of IBM's OS/2 operating system -- are routinely obtainable for free on the Internet.
And the pirates' activities have other consequences as well. They sometimes invade and effectively disable computers being used for scientific research, for example. And many in the information technology industries fear that software theft and other illegal activities are giving the Internet a bad name just when it is gaining unprecedented popularity.
Yet stopping the pirates turns out to be a very difficult task. Law enforcement agencies, software companies and even indignant individuals are stepping up efforts to hunt down electronic lawbreakers, but new methods of stealing and distributing software are developed every day.
By design, the Internet lacks any central administrative authority, and security procedures aimed at thwarting pirates could interfere with the philosophy of free and open communications that is integral to the network. Some suggest the thievery won't be stopped until "bounty hunters" are recruited from the pirates' ranks and paid to hunt their former cohorts.
It may be small comfort to the victims, but most of the pirates interviewed for this story insisted they were not in it for the money.
'Just for the thrill'
"It was just for the thrill of getting free software or logging onto pirate bulletin boards that normal people don't know about," said Mike from Seattle, who says he has never earned a dime in his role as a "courier" for a pirate group.
During the interview, conducted in a tidy suburban home that he shares with friends, Mike uploaded a new program -- "Lode Runner for Windows" by Sierra Games -- to the Internet from his custom-built computer. He then typed e-mail messages to other couriers notifying them of the new game and instructing them to copy it to pirate sites around the world.
There appear to be about 20 major groups dedicated to software piracy, a Los Angeles Times investigation has found, with names such as Razor 1911, Tristar Red Sector Inc. (TRSi), Pirates With Attitude (PWA), Revolutionizing International Piracy (RIP), Legend, Malice and Anti Lamers Foundation (ALF). The groups vary in size from 20 to 100 members, and most have a similar hierarchy: group leaders, senior staff, regional coordinators, couriers and members.
Maryland case
Last month, William L. Sebok, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, announced he had shut down a large pirate site that contained more than 500 megabytes of stolen software -- enough to fill half a dozen personal computer hard disks. The site had been running on a laboratory computer used for processing images from the recent collision of Jupiter and the Shoemaker-Levy comet. The illegal use was detected when processing on the computer inexplicably slowed to a crawl.
Maryland officials tried to trace the thieves back through the Internet, but met with little success: Many of the pirates were found to have used computer accounts belonging to university students in Switzerland, Spain and Slovenia who were unaware their accounts were being used for illicit purposes.
Still, Mr. Sebok says the time he spent tracking the pirates was well justified. "I figured by shutting their site down, I would create a stir for [the pirates] that would be worth it for me," he said. "I didn't want to see the cockroaches tunneling through our computer system any more."