not offering the actual data, rather only a link to other places or peers that contain the infringing material. However, many prosecution cases and convictions argue to the contrary. For instance, Dimitri Mader, the French national who operates a movie distribution warez site, Wawa-Mania, was fined 20,000 € and sentenced, in absentia, to a year in jail by a European court (after fleeing France for the Philippines), for his role in managing the site. In the U.S., through 2004, more than 80 individuals had been prosecuted and convicted for trade in warez products (under the NET Act and other statutes), for movie and software pirating in particular, with a number of individuals being imprisoned, including some enthusiast traders. However, laws and their application to warez activities may vary greatly from country to country; for instance, while Wawa-Mania is under sanction in France, it remains in operation via a host in Moldova, and through use of an Ecuadorian top-level domain. Hence, while high-profile web hosts and domain providers generally do not permit the hosting of warez, and delete sites found to be hosting them, private endeavours and small commercial entities continue to allow the trade in warez to continue. And, in some countries, and at some times, software "piracy" has been encouraged, and international and usual national legal protections ignored. A dispute between Iran and United States over membership in WTO and subsequent U.S. block of Iran's attempts at full-membership has led Iran to encourage the copying of U.S. software; hence, there has been a subsequent surge in Iranian "warez" and "crackz" websites (as Iranian laws do not forbid hosting them inside Iran). The same policy has been adopted by Antigua, and others. Distribution Warez are often distributed outside of The Scene (a collection of warez groups) by torrents (files including tracker info, piece size, uncompressed file size, comments, and vary in size from 1 k, to 400 k.) uploaded to a popular P2P website by an associate or friend of the cracker or cracking crew. An nfo or FILE ID.DIZ is often made to promote who created the release. It is then leeched (downloaded) by users of the tracker and spread to other sharing sites using P2P, or other sources such as newsgroups. From there, it can be downloaded by millions of users all over the world. Often, one release is duplicated, renamed, then re-uploaded to different sites so that