These are really good cliffs notes for the thread:
Originally posted by: esquared
1) Talking about piracy is OK
2) Telling people how to pirate or how to get around copy protection is not OK.
3) One can talk about having pirated and it's impact on their opinions about issues or the affect it had on your life or things in this sort of line of discussion. You can't talk about what you pirated (unless there is a specific reason that it was necessary other than bragging) and you can't talk about ongoing pirating activities.
That is a very good summary of how AnandTech wants piracy issues handled at this point. Thanks, esquared, for condensing a lot of discussion down to some easy to digest bullet points. I think that helps a lot.
From the time the guidelines went live to now, we have refined a lot of internal policy based on the needs of the forum. While most of this is based on interpretation and clarification of what the guidelines actually mean, I do understand that there are many issues that are still a little unclear to the membership, especially regarding enforcement.
After the move to vB (seriously, it's happening ... we're looking at a few weeks after the holidays are behind us), I will try and spend some time with the guidelines and update and clarify them to help enlighten the membership as to the intent and meaning of some of the guidelines, as well as how we intend to enforce some things. I'd like to include examples, but I'm not sure that I will be able to sort all that out while keeping it readable (it's of no use if it's so convoluted that no one reads it or understands it).
But I would like to add something to this discussion ... As Perk said, I'm a bit libertarian in my philosophy, but I know we can't implement idealism on the forums and have it work. There do need to be some limitations in order to keep things functioning as we have them set up. With the launch of vB, we will have the ability to add and alter some of the way we handle enforcement and punishment (because vB is much better at those kinds of things), and I've already mentioned that I'll be trying to clarify the guidelines a little later as well ... but if people are discussing things that they should be allowed to do with their own property then I have no problem allowing that.
What does that mean?
academic discussions of media and software archival (how to backup) and management (how to store and use backups) are permitted. the discussion of practices that could be considered fair use are permitted. sometimes these discussions include topics that overlap with piracy (which is unfortunate), and thus it is wise to make it clear what the real topic of discussion is.
These are explicitly not allowed no matter the topic: posting cd keys (even fake ones -- if you say it's a cd key we'll believe you without testing it and you'll have to deal with the consequences), cd key / serial number generators (although academic discussion of algorithms is still okay), links to these things, or links to copyrighted software and media for which the owner has not chosen to distribute the works freely.
Things may evolve down the line -- we are always evaluating our policies, but this is where we are right now.