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to the rules of copyright that had traditionally applied to books, music and other creative output.

It was clear why this could happen: in the past the public was not in a position to print an unlicensed copy of a book or produce pirated pressings of an LP, as it did not have the machinery to do it. And if it did, this machinery was cumbersome, stationary and easy for law enforcement to track down, in the name of intellectual copyright.

Code or software was different. After graduating from the cassette machines on which the first computer games for domestic use were written in the early 1980s, it was produced on floppy disks, CDs, DVDs and ever-shrinking hard disks. By this time, the Empire of Commerical Software Producers attempted its first strike-back by inserting pieces of additional code onto their product, which sought to prevent unau- thorised copying of their material. CDs and cassettes routinely included digital locks.

While understandable as a tactic, it backfired. As far back as 1982 another German teenager, who later went under the enigmatic hacker’s moniker of MiCe!, finally persuaded his parents – against their better judgement – to buy him a computer for Christmas. But having spent all that money, they refused to give him a penny more for games, not understanding that without the games’ software, which was written on cassettes at the time, the computer was useless as far as their son was concerned.

He found that the only way he could use the computer was to borrow software from friends and then copy it. On one occasion he discovered that the cassette would not copy. He tried everything imaginable, but his computer crashed every time. After days and nights of frustration, he finally spotted a bit of code at a specific point on the tape, which had no apparent function. And then it dawned on him: it was blocking the process! Once he had understood this, MiCe! was able to experi- ment by rewriting the code in different sequences until one night – bingo! – he cracked it.

Early gamers like MiCe! were inspired to crack the locks because they were addicted to gaming, not because they wanted to make money. The copies were passed from gamer to gamer, giving birth to The Scene.

It was still a laborious and time-consuming process as it involved physically copying the code onto a new cassette. Nonetheless, the

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