"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

One possible origin of the word "warez" is from the Middle English term "wares", which refers to any type of manufactured or farm-grown goods. 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 non-count noun, so it was natural to use a count noun to differentiate between one "ware" (one piece of software) and multiple "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, orgin, 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. Phrases that used the term comically in a Middle English context, such as, "Excuse me, kind sir. May I see your warez?" were common. If this origin holds, then 'warez' came directly from Middle English 'wares', perhaps gaining popularity because if its similarity to 'software'.

It's also possible 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. If this was the case, the connection to the word, and meaning, of Middle English "wares", was noticed after the term had gained popularity. 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'. The metaphor of Middle English traders exchanging their "wares" may have helped strengthen popularity of this terminology for software collectors, after the fact.