User talk:IntrigueBlue/Piracy (information)

Piracy is a mess
Okay, I have been trying for some time now to consolidate all information in piracy into one comprehensive article. Originally this was through significant additions to the article on copyright infringement, but piracy lies somewhat beyond the scope of that article. I just discovered the article on copyright infringement of software, and VCD peddler yesterday. As well, you can find significant discussions in the articles on Bittorrent, RIAA and related articles. I was in the process of creating a proposed article in my user namespace to be at Piracy (information), but in light of the widespread discussion of this issue I've realized that this is not something that I can do alone.

So, I'm asking for help, or at least discussion of ways to clear up the present situation. Please comment on the proposed article's talk page, so that we can keep discussion centralized... despite the insanity that attempts to cover this rather complex topic. -- INTRIGUE B LUE (talk) 06:46, 22 September 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree wholeheartedly, this is a desperately needed page. I often do cleanup on the links to the disambiguation page Bootleg, and I'm always having to choose among bootleg recording, copyright infringement, and counterfeit, neither of which exactly means "pirate".  I meant to just incorporate a few of the bits from "bootleg recording", which I've worked on extensively, but ended up playing with it quite a bit more than that -- I hope you don't mind.  What we probably really need to do is do some comprehensive surfing among the wikilinks on the existing articles, rounding up everything that's already out there -- this article should probably make liberal use of main and see.   Back to you now...  :)  &mdash; Catherine\talk 22:33, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

Not at all. I'm delighted that someone has taken an interest in the project besides myself. I have to commend you on your edits, you've really cleaned up the framework a lot. I'd like to get this article to the point where it can be moved to main namespace as quickly as possible so that we can start cleaning up the mess of piracy discussed in other articles. I don't have the energy to do any more research tonight, but 1990s is now completely empty. I believe that there was something involving public FTP servers at the time, as well as usenet distribution. I'm not entirely sure where to go for that, so I'll leave it like this for now. -- INTRIGUE B LUE (talk) 03:22, 25 September 2006 (UTC)


 * This is really starting to shape up well -- you're doing great work! I don't quite know where to start on the history stuff, personally.  I think I agree that the Music/Movies stuff should go in history; in my opinion the Methods section should stick to pretty simple definitions, with lots of links to other articles that more fully explain all the terms in the field.  (The link to "ripping", which you deleted, definitely belongs somewhere in this article.)  I'm  almost out of time to work on this today, but I agree, I'd love to get this in shape to move into the mainspace pretty soon.  I bet it'll start attracting some new contributors as soon as we start correcting links on Special:Whatlinkshere/Copyright_infringement to link here instead...  :)  &mdash; Catherine\talk 23:27, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry I've been neglecting the article the past few days, too much going on at school I'm afraid. Tomorrow I'll try to get at least a good framework set up for history, talking about usenet and all the rest. -- INTRIGUE B LUE (talk) 05:09, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
 * -->Or I can just make up for it by not sleeping tonight :) INTRIGUE B LUE  (talk)

I reworked the recent history of piracy quite a bit, completely rewriting a few paragraphs to make it flow better. Also, I feel like the section needs to be more specifically (and evenly) divided, maybe something like:


 * origins of piracy (pre-digital age)
 * piracy and recordable media (1970s-1980s)
 * usenet and ftp piracy (1990s)
 * napster (1999-2001)
 * gnutella and limewire (2001-2003)
 * edonkey and bittorrent (2003-present)

Of course, that's far too specific for the broad scope of the article... I'm pretty sure now that the best course of action is to split that section off into a history of information piracy article. What do you think?

Also, there's a problem with the last paragraph in the individual justification section. I'm not really sure what to do with it, so I've left it as is, but it argues that the quality of music has degraded since the mid-1990s (which I agree with) as a result of piracy. From my research it looks like piracy wasn't widely practiced or accepted until around the turn of the century, so the purported cause happened after the effect. It's entirely possible that it's a contributing factor, but certainly not the whole reason. Actually, it doesn't really belong in justification.

Maybe the whole justification section should be scrapped and incorporated into other areas, since it represents only one POV. I'm not entirely sure how best to break that down, but it does seem to rather unbalance the article. INTRIGUE B LUE (talk) 07:23, 30 September 2006 (UTC)


 * I'd change that usenet/ftp timeline to (1990s-present)
 * Few references The Scene, Topsite_(warez), Internet piracy pyramid (although that pyramid would be more accurate description if you stacked several pyramids side by side to form a circle(and multiply numbers accordingly)).
 * If you check public torrents like thepiratebay, it's easy to see that most torrents contain material originating from warez groups like RELOADED and Razor_1911. They still use topsites as their release points from where the stuff slowly finds its way to the public like the pyramid describes.
 * Somewhere around 2000ish, usenet piracy turned "commercial", as most operators started filtering out binary groups from their newsfeed distribution.
 * Companies like Giganews started selling "uncensored" access to usenet, meaning they mirror everything that gets posted on usenet, including pirated material, and allow downloads for paying customers.
 * Agreed, most of this is too specific to be in this article, and it should go to History of information piracy or something alike.
 * S33k3r 02:20, 31 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Good stuff. I like everything you've added, although I think it might be a bit too much detail on the BitTorrent saga -- I had the same trouble in my first draft of the Napster bit and had to trim it back quite a lot.  The detail of who did what when should be left to the BitTorrent article; this article just needs a good paragraph or so on how and why BT and eDonkey are relevant to piracy.


 * Yes, I think eventually we're going to need a separate "history" article, but it should probably wait until we've moved this to mainspace and any potential renaming or other structural issues have been addressed. I keep pondering that perhaps this should be the text of the copyright infringement article, with some of the more detailed legal/penalty information we were planning to preserve there moved to another sub-article.  I believe the copyright infringement of software article was moved there from software piracy because of the controversy over the term "piracy", and I suspect we may run into that naming issue again with this article if it's mainspaced with this title.  But I also think what we have here is really good, much improved over the current CI article, and a much better overview of the many related articles.


 * What do you think? (If we did decide to put this one at copyright infringement, we might need some advice from the folks on Requested moves to make sure all the histories are preserved properly.)


 * As for the justification section, right now it's full of reference-free justifications, which I'd bet are the personal opinions of some of the very people who write this encyclopedia (and download pirated music). I think it should pretty much be rebuilt from scratch, based on external references.  Most of the reasoning here is common-sense or firsthand knowledge of why people pirate, but we need to base what we say on what other publications have to say about it.  Also, the section should probably be renamed "Causes of" or "Reasons for" or "Popularity of" or "Psychology of", or something.  I know the last paragraph doesn't fit; I copied it here from Napster because it had some important points that weren't already in "Justifications", but I'd always meant to genericize it and work it more into the flow of what's there...sorry it's still just sitting there like a lump.


 * Next step: more thorough referencing.


 * Note I probably won't get another chance to work on this until Monday, but I'm definitely not done collaborating -- this is fun! Hope you're having a good weekend! &mdash; Catherine\talk 04:12, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I was surprised by how fast that BitTorrent section built up. It's like it has a mind of its own. I will try to prune back some of the excess material, although to be sure I'll try to incorporate it into the BitTorrent article where possible.

I don't like the idea of moving this article to copyright infringement. I started out trying to rework that article, but despite the similar subjects there are noteable differences in scope. At the very least, piracy is a subset of copyright infringement - and we've seen how much material there is concerning piracy already, without adding more related subjects. My impression of the difference, though, is that piracy is more concerned with the undirected social gravitation towards this phenomenon, and the results of this, while copyright infringement is a deliberate act committed by an individual or corporate entity. I guess the best analogy would be that piracy is to copyright infringement what political science is to psychology: in political science the individual is completely irrelevant, and attention is focused instead on socio-political trends as a whole, while in psychology the more closely individuals can be analyzed the better.

Aside from that, I think the word "piracy" has been widely accepted and used by people on all sides of the issue, from the MPAA to individuals engaged in the activity. The only groups that seem to have raised a noteable objection to this are the advocates of the freedom of information, who are of the three perhaps the least significant in the issue. By no means should their perspective go ignored, but I think that including mention and explanation of the allegations that the term is loaded should be enough to ensure impartiality, especially in the light of the non-existance of another name which could suitably encompass the range of topics that we are discussing.

Sorry, I'm tired, so my language is wandering from informal to as tight and crisp as the other side of this page - it's not my way of bristling at the very suggestion that piracy be considered synonymous with copyright infringement.

You're absolutely right about the justification section. I wrote it to help to balance out the formerly strong anti-piracy bias at copyright infringement, but without the backup of any particular publications - simply working from common sense and memory of past discussions. In a way, I'm the worst person to be involved in an article like this, since I have so much experience with BitTorrent in particular that my research has been mostly limited to looking up dates on other Wikipedia articles. I didn't need to search for articles on the police raid on The Pirate Bay, because I was there - likewise for the shutdowns of LokiTorrent and Suprnova. However, adding sources to back up your statements after the fact is certainly a backwards approach to writing, and I'll do my best to take a step back and try to add some sources to existing sections, as well as providing at least cursory support for future edits. Hopefully this will help with the development of some sections that we've been ignoring, such as solutions. Actually, I think I'll take a whack at that one.

Tomorrow. Tonight I'm going to bed. -- INTRIGUE B LUE (talk|contribs) 05:43, 1 October 2006 (UTC)


 * If this article is still being maintained, the information found in this article might be a useful addition. -XJDHDR (talk) 04:59, 16 January 2011 (UTC)