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Abstract
Warez trading, the non-commercial hobby of collecting and trading copyrighted works (particularly software), has been singled out as a major cause of online piracy. In 1994, David LaMacchia, a student who operated a bulletin board service for exchanging copyrighted software, was the first person criminally prosecuted for warez trading. However, a US Supreme Court case had already declared that copyrighted works were not capable of being taken by fraud, so the judge quickly dismissed the case. After three years of trying, copyright owners finally addressed the perceived hole exposed by LaMacchia's prosecution when Congress enacted the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act in 1997. Unquestionably, the NET Act has successfully criminalized most warez trading. This article explains warez trading, evaluates the structure of a prosecution for criminal copyright infringement, and considers other criminal laws applicable to warez trading. The article concludes with a hypothesis about why Congress and the Department of Justice continue to obsess about warez trading.