thumb|Demonstration in Sweden in support of file sharing piracy, 2006 "Warez" refers primarily to copyrighted works traded in violation of copyright law. The term generally refers to illegal releases by organized groups, as opposed to peer-to-peer file sharing between friends or large groups of people with similar interest using a darknet. It usually does not refer to commercial for-profit software counterfeiting. This term was initially coined by members of the various computer underground circles, but has since become commonplace among Internet users and the mass media.

Etymology

The word warez is intended as a plural of "ware", short for computer software. Thus it is intended to be pronounced like the word wares or wears 1, but some people apply a nonstandard pronunciation like the English pronunciation of Juárez 2.

One possible originOr: date=December 2008 of the word "warez" is from "ware", meaning any kind of product of human labor (from whence, or course, "software"), and, especially in its plural form, goods offered for sale. Before the Internet was available, users of dial-up bulletin board systems coined the term to indicate more than one piece of software. "Software" is a non-count noun, so it was natural to use a count noun to differentiate between one "ware" (one piece of software) and multiple "wares" or, more humorously, "warez" (multiple pieces of software).Fact: date=June 2008 Due to the relatively large amounts of time needed to transfer large files over slow telephone modems and bulletin board systems (BBSes), software exchangers would typically ask for one-for-one trades from their colleagues (sometimes file for file, but more typically byte for byte). While the 'cost' of each byte transfer might have been equal, or 1:1, the desireability of the software (quality, origin, legality, rarity, privacy) was not, prompting exhangers to first request to see what warez were available on a particular server before submitting their own 'prized warez', especially on a typical premium server with a 3:1 or 10:1 transfer ratio. Hence, software exchangers adopted a merchant-like attitude with their software collection(s) and the term "warez" became apt. The somewhat dated flavor of the word "wares" is said to have led to the use of much humorously intended mock-medieval phraseology amongst software traders, such as, "Excuse me, kind sir. May I see your warez?"

It's also possibleOr: date=December 2008 that 'warez' was derived by an example of folk etymology, where multiple software was incorrectly referred to as 'softwares', and a simple abbreviation of softwares gives wares. During the bulletin board era, there was a proliferation of terms used to describe broad classes of software, derived from the word 'software' itself, (freeware, shareware, postcardware, donateware, malware, annoyware), these became collectively referred to as "wares", meaing something more akin to 'classes of software' rather than 'multiple pieces of software'.