Censorship bills won't solve the problem
If you were unfamiliar with acronyms SOPA and PIPA a few months ago, you most certainly are aware of their context by now.
The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are proposals by the House and Senate to give the United States government and copyrighted owners more leeway to fight online piracy and take those to court who disobey the law. Those in favor of the bills include TimeWarner, National Basketball Association and Ford Motor Company. These supporters and others claim the law will help protect intellectual property, jobs and fight against foreign websites.
As of only a few days ago, GoogleInc. had seven million signatures on a petition responding to the House and Senate’s anti-piracy legislation. This legislation would punish websites that share music, movies and other files defined as “stolen material.” The effect piracy has on companies can be computed to millions of dollars. Visitors to Wikipedia’s website, as well as dozens of others, noticed that the entire screen was blacked out, urging those to contact their local congressman to oppose SOPA and PIPA. Wikipedia’s banner later read, “Thank you for protecting Wikipedia. (We’re not done yet.)”
In a quick response to SOPA and PIPA, New Zealand based file-sharing site Megaupload was shut down by U.S. Justice Department authorities on Thursday after being accused of copyright infringement. In the past, Napster, a popular music sharing website, shut down after being accused of stealing copyrighted files and making illegal profit. Megaupload creators could face up to 20 years in prison. Websites like these create easy access to download music and movies without paying a fee and give its consumers easier access to share files through various computers. Not only does this raise the issue of the number of sites on the Internet, foreign and domestic, that share such files illegally, but also the number of consumers that share and download illegally.
Megaupload claimed to be protected by the Millennium Copyright Act, which typically covers domestic websites to make sure websites do not financially profit from such downloads and that websites take down any copyrighted file. YouTube, owned by Google, is forced to take down videos that are copyrighted and illegal to post on the public domain quite frequently. According to federal prosecutors, Megaupload made $175 million off of $500 million worth of copyrighted files.
By an impressive show of force from the online community, leaders in Congress put the anti-piracy bills to the side. Via Twitter, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that action on the bill was to be delayed until Tuesday but had not yet died. House Representative Lamar Smith of Texas indicated that he, too, called off plans to push the bill and hoped to draft a new measure next month. Google Vice President Vint Cerf, in response to Smith, asserts that, “Requiring search engines to delete a domain name begins a worldwide arms race of unprecedented ‘censorship’ of the website,” in a letter published on CNet website.
By censoring websites as China and Iran have done in the past, the policing of the Internet will only add more fuel to the fire. The shutdown will give other anonymous pirates opportunities to hack and steal more private information in which federal authorities may have a harder time controlling. As much as the Internet is not private, consumers around the world are allowed to enter any website with the freedom of picking and choosing, to an extent, what he or she can view. Imagine if websites containing torrents were shut down and consumers were then forced to buy music from ITunes or actual CDs. Would you actually buy music from other vendors or drive to a store to buy a CD at an even higher price?
Back in December 2010, when SOPA and PIPA emerged, it may have been difficult to understand how these bills would influence the way the online community accesses information. After much research, these anti-piracy bills that supporters claim are designed to protect American companies from the theft of intellectual property could really change the way consumers use the Internet. It places websites such as Google and Wikipedia in an uncomfortable position to “police” their sites by removing links as considered piracy that could be a threat to free speech. My generation is used to getting for free what others sweat to produce, whether it’s music, movies, books, etc. It’s not just Hollywood that misses out on profit but anyone; from a filmmaker, to an author, to a musician who discovers that people are taking their work for free, as if they owned it, rather than paying something, anything to the artist for whom this is their source of income or the company that invests money to bring these works to the public. That’s a position that should not be dismissed lightly.
I, like the rest of my generation, enjoy watching free movies and downloading free music off the Internet. It’s obvious that those in Hollywood feel they are missing out on a deep profit and are really controlling how these bills work. But Hollywood needs to understand that if they continue to ban the sharing and downloading of free music and movies, there will be other ways to illegally share these files.
If these bills are reconstructed in a way that would protect American citizens from scams across the globe, then I feel consumers would be all for it. But to ban information that everyone regularly uses is ludicrous. What the government needs to understand is that these recent online protests out of haste can cause greater problems in the future as these bills weren’t written, as critics say, in a fashion that targets the real problems.