Since before windows 3.1; warez was there.
The term warez symbolises many conditional variations as follows:

Disgruntled paying customers distribute warez to unpaying consumers.
Hackers or their apprentices often release them by means of the terms
hacks, cracks, serials and keygens (key generators) to aquire
popularity and later be employed to defend companies from such.
It is a form of anarchy: neither good or bad; sometimes creating chaos;
sometimes putting the consumer first.
There are now software designers whom know their software will never be
perfect that trade as freeware or open source producers surviving
donations (probably the best mens of getting what you payed for is to
support by donation).
not to be confused with they will never get it right these people
deserve true distinction as the fairest of the rest.
They avoid the need for these hacker apprentices.
The shareware developer suffers the most; their shareware nag banners
fuel the biggest part of the warez trade! (honestly .. they're full of
adware bugs n stuff)
Surprisingly there is little need for it; there is so many possible
alternatives now with the above mentioned and even so i can assure the
paying consumer only 15% of the entire world population will ever need
warez because if you dont like microsoft activation; get linux.(its
free)
mp3's movies, documents etc fall under the warez category but people
prefer their own payed for versions anyway.
Games are labelled warez when distributed with so called anti serial or
activation code implementaion to avoid payed for verification.
We all suffer for this 15% of unpayed customers and quite frankly
they're just bad credit or underage users.
Feel free to flame, add constructive critisism and correct my mistakes.
I'm gonna write a book on this subject.