I have seen a good amount of confusion regarding where pirated content originates..

This is a brief overview of the sources for pirated material

The Scene
A large % of pirated material originates from release groups in “The Scene”

More information about “The Scene” @ /links/warez-scene/
This content then trickles down to:

• Private Torrent Trackers
• Publicly Tracked Torrent Indexes
• DDL Blogs/Forums
• Usenet/Newsgroups
• IRC (xdcc/dcc)
• DC++
• Other Forms of P2P/Filesharing

Release Groups
Aside from the release groups in “The Scene”, there are many others that reside elsewhere:

• Private Tracker Internal Release Groups
• Publicly Tracked Torrent Release Groups
• DDL Forum Release Groups
• Usenet/Newsgroup Release Groups

..this content trickles down as well

Individual Users
All other pirated material comes from individual users uploading content

Distinguishing the origin of content
Release Databases
There are many databases that log releases originating from within “The Scene”

PreDB’s (Pre Databases)
pr3_10-2-2013

There are also databases that log releases originating from forms of P2P

P2P Release Databases
..although compared to PreDB’s these release databases are less maintained/reliable

xrel_10-2-2013