A Look at the Topic of Copyright Infringement and Online Piracy on the Internet

Copyright infringement and online piracy is definitely a huge problem on the internet. Whether one posts a video on YouTube with a copyrighted song or downloads the newest movies through a torrent website, people continue to infringe on the copyright holders. Is copyright infringement all necessarily bad? After all, Justin Bieber became famous and popular through a YouTube video of him singing someone else’s copyrighted music. Lately, entire countries, like Europe and the United States, have been attempting themselves to overcome copyright infringement.

The United States government seems to believe that copyright infringement should be stopped at all costs, even, for example, by using a faulty, poorly written bill to cause more harm than good. In this case, the written bill is called the Stop Online Piracy Act, or better known as S.O.P.A. It was presented in the House of Representatives while its sister bill was presented in the senate (Schatz B1-B2). The internet does indeed have many problems relating to copyright, but SOPA does it in a way where it could permanently damage the internet forever.

In order to truly recognize what this bill can do to affect the internet, a good understanding of copyright, piracy, and how the internet uses these two is in order. According to Roman Espejo’s book, Copyright Infringement (Opposing Viewpoints), copyright is defined to be “a form of protection provided by the government to the authors of ‘original works of authorship, including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other individual works.

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This means that a person is not allowed to break the rights of the copyright holder, which is normally the author of the work. Espejo also continues on to mention that just because a person has the possession of a copyrighted work, it does not mean that a person has the possession of the copyright too.

For example, if someone were to buy a copy of a soundtrack which hit stores last weekend and make a copy of the CD for a friend, the copied CD would be considered copyright infringement. The same goes with any other kind of copyrighted work: “The law provides that transfer of ownership of any material object that embodies a protected work does not, of itself, convey any rights in the copyright.” Internet copyright infringement is no different. Most will agree that college students and unsuspecting adults have downloaded content before. However, downloading copyrighted content is illegal. It is easy for any innocent person to browse the internet and download a song or program that isn’t considered freeware.

Torrenting websites like Piratebay and programs like utorrent make it quick and efficient to download copyrighted work without paying for it. YouTube is also a popular website that unknowingly hosts copyrighted TV shows and music videos. An article by Amy Schatz from the Wall Street Journal mentions in her article that an estimate of 13% of adults who live in America have come into contact with some illegally obtained movie or TV show on the internet, and in the process, media companies have lost billions of dollars (Schatz B1-B2). Clearly, the entire internet buzzes with copyright infringement and piracy. S.O.P.A attempts to completely eliminate it all.

Amy Schatz’s article gives a clear explanation on what S.O.P.A is said to do. S.O.P.A will make companies that are specifically in the United States stop connections with sites from out of the country. This means, for example, that Google wouldn’t be allowed to show websites from out of country that contain piracy in their search engine. By doing this, piracy websites would receive fewer views from U.S internet users. S.O.P.A would not do anything directly to websites from out of country, like Piratebay, which is based in Sweden. But it would specifically harm websites that reside in the United States. This way, websites that contain piracy or copyright infringement of any sort (movies, music, TV shows, programs) would not be reached to the people of the United States. S.O.P.A would give the right-holders of such work a huge amount of power and control.

According to an editorial in the Los Angeles Times, Lamar S. Smith, a congressman, is the creator of this bill with the intention of protecting U.S intellectual property. Protecting this property comes with its own price, however.

Piracy is a terrible cost to the United States economy. It seems like an efficient way to lessen illegal activity on the internet in the United States, but there are many loopholes with this bill. The author of an editorial from Human Events quoted Senator Marco Rubio, who agreed that the bill is faulty: “Congress should listen and avoid rushing through a bill that could have many unintended consequences.” S.O.P.A has created a stir on the internet, with good arguments coming from both the supporters and protesters. Even congress seems to have mixed opinions, especially after the Internet has a black out protest. Congress’ supporters and opponents are coming from both democratic and republican parties and from all ages too. (Economist)

The article also mentions that SOPA has no doubts with the House and Senate Judiciary committees, because they receive a huge sum of money from the media industry that gets its content pirated. An article from The Economist states that groups in support of S.O.P.A donated 85 million dollars to the House and 45 million dollars to the Senate, while those against it only donated 17 million and 27 million dollars in that order. (33) Of course, these groups partially consist of companies that can afford such donations. However, money shouldn’t be the only factor to consider. The faultiness of S.O.P.A is a topic that should be addressed as the number one concern.

Amy Schatz mentions that a part of S.O.P.A used to involve blocking the DNS of foreign piracy websites. DNS stands for domain-name system. When a person types the address of a website into the URL box of a browser, the DNS makes sure that the data goes to where it needs to. The bill in congress would force the traffic of DNS to connect with piracy websites. People in the United States would be unable to reach these foreign websites completely.

According to Schatz, cyber security experts don’t believe this would work. (B1) In fact, this same type of transferring of traffic is the same method that hackers use to create discord on the internet. Involving DNS blocking wouldn’t be the best idea if it’s the same sort of method that hackers use to disrupt cyber security. The White House was later notified of this and agreed that it would not support the bill that meddled with the DNS codes of websites. Eventually, the bill was revised so that it did not involve anything to do with DNS. This only shows, however, how the congressmen don’t fully understand how this bill could affect the internet as a whole. The inaccuracy of that one part of the bill will most probably not help it pass in congress.

Many agree that the bill has a good purpose, but it is written so generally and broadly that it would cause major complaints from people and internet companies alike. Probably one of the biggest complaints is that S.O.P.A will destroy what seems to be a big label of the internet, and that is its openness and freedom.

The article by Michael Crowley brings up this issue in a great amount of detail. He says that the Obama White House was not too sure on the topic of “online censorship” that S.O.P.A could bring about. Because the bill is not specific enough with how it would deal with copyright and piracy, websites would have a difficult time ensuring that they are copyright free, so that the government would not intervene. User-generated websites would be at a huge risk, for example, because they depends on whatever the users upload to keep their site popular, like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and especially Wikipedia. The United States supports the right of free speech and expression tremendously, and the internet shouldn’t be any different. It should not be censored like how China would censor certain websites from the general public. S.O.P.A would add more problems to the YouTube company.

From personal experience, I have come across many videos on YouTube that were taken down due to copyright infringement. I’ve also had my own videos taken down for including music in the background of a recorded video. S.O.P.A would make copyright infringement a more serious issue, meaning YouTube would have to supervise practically every YouTube video very carefully. Websites like Tumblr, which is a blogging website that allows users to post anything from pictures to videos, would also be monitored carefully. Pictures like screenshots from the latest Twilight movie or a short video clip from a cancelled cartoon series would not be allowed, and that’s a huge part of what Tumblr is known for.

DeviantART, a website for artists and writers to post their work, could also be threatened by this bill. The complication of checking each piece of work for copyrighted material would become too much. Artists, such as myself and a generous amount of people I know, wouldn’t have the same freedoms as we had before S.O.P.A. Drawing a copyright character, for example, a character that needs written permission from the creator himself, would be taken into account far more than now. These are small matters that don’t even contribute to the losses from piracy, but S.O.P.A is so generalized that it can easily include small matters like these.

Facebook is a huge website that depends on user-generated work. I personally, have seen my own artwork being used by users on Facebook as profile pictures. It doesn’t bother me because my art is not being sold. If anything, it is free promotion. However, in relation to my own experience, copyrighted work of actual companies could be more serious. Facebook would have a difficult time as well monitoring what people put up. The government has more important issues to deal with than a kid lip-syncing to one of their favourite songs on YouTube.

The bill’s complaints did not go unheard, however. The Economist went into detail about what companies have done to stop the bill. Its article reported that on January 18th, multiple famous websites previously mentioned, as well as average internet users, protested against S.O.P.A by censoring their websites, blogs, Facebook pages, and other websites for an entire 24 hours.

Wikipedia’s founder decided to censor his own website by replacing all the English versions of articles to dark pages. At the top of each page, there is a message “Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge”. Google did not close down completely (Dan Lyon’s article mentions that they receive 80 million dollars from just ads alone). Lyon’s article said that this money is revenue, which could decrease if S.O.P.A were to pass, because it would eliminate specific websites from the search engine’s results. They did put a black bar over the Google logo, which if clicked, would direct the internet user to an anti-S.O.P.A article. Lyons quotes the cofounder of Google, Sergey Brin, who had this to say in response of S.O.P.A and the retaliation against it: “(S.O.P.A) would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world.

Imagine my astonishment when the newest threat to free speech has come from none other than the United States.” He holds an impressing argument there; with this bill, the United States internet could be no different from the internet of China’s. Angry blog writers on Tumblr blocked their own blogs in protest as well. People do not want their freedom of expression to be taken away regardless of what they do because the internet was always a free and open environment. Jim Giles states in his article, “Piracy Bill Walks the Plank” that more than a million emails were sent to the US congress, along with 90,000 phone calls in protest. People also took that extra step and wrote out a letter by hand to send to the U.S House of Representatives.

The Human Events editorial shed some more light on how opponents react to the bill. With the freedom and liveliness of the Internet limited, third party groups are held reliable for making sure they do not intentionally link websites with copyrighted material. (3) Copyright infringement is a serious issue in the United States already; the punishments for downloading copyrighted content are already huge and out of proportion. An article from Newsone.com, written by the associated press, told the story of a woman who downloaded 24 songs illegally off the internet. This woman, a single mother, was forced by the federal jury to pay almost 2 million dollars in response to the illegal downloading. That is a tremendous amount of money for a woman to pay, for a small amount of songs. With the generality of this bill, the consequences for illegal activity could be drastic.

It’s understandable, however, why congress would try so much to create a bill that will please the internet as a whole, yet still cut down on internet piracy. McSherry wrote two separate articles, one that was specifically against S.O.P.A. She brings up the fact that the economy has lost $58 billion dollars from piracy. This affects jobs in the long run, since 19 million of United State’s workers are involved with intellectual property. The job loss, according to the Institute for Policy Innovation, adds up to 373,000 American jobs that were taken out. Congress has to at least attempt to create bills, even if they have as many cons as pros.

Ramayah, the author of a journal of scientific research tested a study of how much internet piracy is done by students at a university. It was discovered that a tremendous amount of the school was involved. Ramayah further proves his point of the bad effects of piracy by reporting that in 2000, a US industry in Malaysia was estimated to have lost practically $95.9 million dollars. This ridiculous damage shows a high piracy reading of 66%. It is understandable that this issue is a big deal. S.O.P.A is just not the way to go about it. It cannot be the solution because, not only does it make the internet’s future hazy and uncertain on whether it’ll fix problems, but it creates uneasiness to the rest of the internet community, as well as famous and popular websites. (McSherry, 20) There must be a more effective approach to the issue.

S.O.P.A does mean well, but it is too faulty to be passed or even considered. It ultimately all comes down to what a person believes is more important: the disruption of our freedoms, or the wellness of our economy. Regardless, I believe that while piracy is causing the U.S government many problems, any anti-piracy bill should make sure that bloggers and creative remixers are not harmed. These people make their own work, just like big businesses that make copyrighted movies and music. Jim Giles’ article says, “Striking a balance between the two will prove important if politicians want to stop the angry emails.” If the U.S government wants to change not just the internet but any part of society, it should be take into account all the kinds of people that could be harmed.