No offense, but I find the thought that unorganized random groups of people who crack games illegally using established rules, well, hilarious.
They're not unorganized though, quite the opposite in fact. They have job roles, some members have to actually record and source the original material, be that record it from cable, put a cam in a cinema or even steal the screeners from the oscars, and in the case of games releases need to be leaked prior to public consumption. Then they have people who have access to extremely fast hardware farms who rip and downsample the source to a compressed format following various predefined scene rules or in the case of games, serious coders who can subvert DRM present in the games executables. Then they have uploaders with extremely fast internet connections who upload it to private networks of FTPs. Often the topsite FTPs need to have speeds which are outside of what groups can afford to buy and also cannot be tracked to physical locations of the members, so there's also teams of people who scan the internet to find unsecured private FTPs or other hosts, and they hack them and hide the content there. They also have people who do ascii art for the NFOs and all sorts of other jobs.
Think about it a second, the scene rules state that the first scene group to release new content wins, so speed is key, that's why something can air on cable and be ripped to a 1-4Gb file and uploaded in about 2-3 minutes of it airing. That kind of efficiency is only possible through competition which requires massive amounts of organization and skill.
The rules are in fact established among them across the most prominent groups on the scene and revised regularly through consensus, everything from the standards acceptable for encoding, the format file names should be in, rules for nuking a release (marking it as a failed release) and a huge number of other standards to do with compression, archiving etc.
All of this is 100% true. And it goes back even further to BBS
"bittorrent" is not how a "scene release" is really released. on BT is where you will find all the repackaged crap with malware added into the mix.
Yep. The entire P2P network that has built up around distributing scene releases is completely separate and dependent on the scene releases being released into the public domain (not all are, some internal rips remain private). Almost all of the reputable scene groups heavily frown upon the P2P networks sharing their content, you'll often see it in the nfo files that come with releases, that people shouldn't be using P2P and they should in fact buy the media they consume and like.
Scene releases are all done over private FTP servers or Usenet.
Then it disseminates to private torrent trackers and then to public torrent trackers.
The risk for most people comes from someone uploading a repack with malware onto a public tracker.
If you have access to the FTP/usenet/private trackers though you're more or less fine in regards to avoiding malware/viruses.
Exactly right. Private trackers (invite only) do have their own communities and often come with strict rules that to some degree extend the scene rules to the P2P community, often only verified scene releases are allowed, users are punished for leeching and torrents are distributed automatically using RSS feeds and auto downloading and various other things. Good private trackers enforce extremely tight rules so all members benefit, there's many layers of security to keep the tracker out of the public eye. They often have large infrastructures of seed boxes that the community maintain which give near unlimitless download speeds for members.
Above that is the surface web stuff like TPB and other public trackers, which anyone can post viruses too and that's where the vast majority of uninformed people get their media from and the quality is absolutely diabolical and there's no standards in sight, odds of viruses is high etc.
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