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By the year 2000 new games with dazzling graphics were cascading onto the market. The Pokémon series rolled out thick and fast, while at the more extreme end, WWF Smackdown 2: Know Your Role was proving a big hit, along with Grand Theft Auto, whose storylines were forging their violent and pornographic hallmarks. Matrix was always desperate to get his hands on the latest game, but he just couldn’t afford them all.

In respect of gaming, his life mirrored Renu’s. Otherwise the two had nothing in common.

Determined to satisfy his driving passion, Matrix discovered an Internet community known as the fXp scene. This phenomenon was an important moment, not just in Matrix’s life, but in the rapidly changing parameters of Internet culture.

Over two decades since the introduction of the personal computer, its usage had become the subject of a passionate if arcane debate – among its developers, prophets and most committed users – about its role in society. Many of the criminal skills on the Web have emerged from an essential division in the philosophical debate generated by the Internet.

In simple terms the debate is between those, on the one hand, who believe its commercial role is paramount and those, on the other, who argue that it is in the first instance a social and intellectual tool, whose very nature changes the fundamental moral code of mass communication. For the former, any copying of computer ‘code’ (shorthand for the computer language in which software or a program is written) that is not explicitly sanctioned is regarded as a criminal violation. The latter, however, are convinced that by releasing software you are also relinquishing copyright.

The heart of the matter was revealed as long ago as February 1976 when Bill Gates addressed an open letter to ‘the hobbyists’, an inchoate cluster of computer users who would variously evolve into geeks, hackers and crackers. In the letter Gates bemoaned the fact that 90 per cent of those using Microsoft’s first programming language, Altair BASIC, had never bought it. Instead they had copied it, which meant that Gates was not getting the return on the huge amount of work and cash he had invested in developing it. Although Gates’s language bore the hallmark of inelegance common to many geeks, the message was clear: he accused the hobbyists of theft.

The hobbyists, geeks, hackers – ‘crackers’ as they later became known – disagreed. As far as they were concerned, once ‘code’ was out there, it was fair game. Both on the West Coast and at MIT in Cambridge, MA, some of the world’s most important computer developers and early users were infected by a strong dosage of a ‘kumbaya’ ideology, which held that this particular technology was one for bringing the world together and that for some (unspecified) reason it was not subject 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 unauthorised 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.