The Philippine Online Chronicles

What would it take to stop online piracy? On January 18 (until 19 in the United States), Websites such as Reddit, Wikipedia and others around the world are going ‘black’. They’re going to tune out for a few hours in protest against two pending legislation in the United States Congress. The first is the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the second is the Senate version of the bill called Protect IP Act (IP means intellectual property). Google, Microsoft, Mozilla Corporation, Facebook, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Yahoo!, eBay, American Express, reedit, Reporters without Borders, LinkedIn Corporation, Twitter, and Zynga Game Network are some of the biggest names in opposition to SOPA and PIPA. They say that both bills threaten Freedom of Expression, and second the very fabric of the Internet.

Those in favor of SOPA and PIPA is a venerable who’s who of the Hollywood lobby. Aside from the MPAA the list includes the Recording Industry association of America, the Copyright Alliance, NBC Universal, the Screen Actors Guild, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the Nashville Songwriters Association International, the Songwriters Guild of America, Viacom, Institute for POlicy Innovation, Macmillan Publishers, Acushnet Company, the National Association of Theatre Owners, the Independent Film and Television Alliance, and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association. Companies like GoDaddy initially supported the bills but backtracked after their customers— website owners staged a protest and moved their domains out of the company to other registers.

Fighting piracy isn’t evil right? I mean, “Piracy is bad,” right? Stealing something is bad, right? Musicians, Actors, Writers, the movie industry, the music industry, and other creative industries need to protect their ideas right? They need to profit so they can make more of the same thing, correct? So the argument of organizations such as the Motion Picture Association of America say SOPA and PIPA are constitutionally sound.

What does SOPA and PIPA do exactly that has gotten a lot of people and companies in protest?

First opponents argue of a “Chilling effect” on user generated content, and sites that host that content such as YouTube, and Vimeo. Rebecca MacKinnon argued that SOPA and PIPA will create a China-like Great Firewall of Web censorship. Even linking on Twitter could be in danger.

Second, opponents argue that, “Safe Harbor” protections will weaken. “Safe Harbor” means any website with “copyright infringing content” would be first asked if they would take down the material. This is happening on YouTube where companies like Paramount would ask YouTube to take down material found in breach of their copyright. YouTube would then be given ample time to comply before the lawyers file lawsuits.

Third, opponents argue that language of the bill is ambiguous and broad that a mere United States consumer using a website hosted outside the United States gives the United States jurisdiction over that said website. Say someone from browsing the Pirate Bay from the United States will immediately grant the United States authority to go after the pirate site which is hosted outside the United States.

Fourth, Users could uploading illegal content could be held criminally liable.

Fifty, some argue that the bill is a potential violation of privacy because it could open the door to the active use of deep packet inspection”

Six, the proposed legislation held language that servers are ordered to stop referring requests for infringing domains. DNS redirection has since been removed the language of the bill. Protest has surged across the Internet. On the White House website, a petition was launched against SOPA. United States President Barack Obama responded, “Don’t worry Internet, I got your back on that SOPA thing”. In a nutshell, what the White House said was, while there is a need to curb piracy online it should not create “new cybersecurity risks” or disrupt the “underlying architecture of the Internet”. And that’s the real question isn’t it? How do you balance the legitimate interest of Intellectual property owners and web security?

The question has been answered.

Wired declared on 29 November 2010 that “The Age of Music Piracy is officially over”.

And the simplistic answer is: make content available that’s easy to get to, when consumers want it. That’s all consumers really want. Services such as iTunes has solved this for music. It made it so easy, and so simple to get music that downloading music illegally is so much more hassle.

But iTunes isn’t available everywhere isn’t it? Amazon mp3 isn’t available outside the United States as well. Services such as Pandora aren’t either.

The reason and root cause of it all is— licensing. Typically, Hollywood makes money by licensing content and each territory has different licensing schemes.

So you won’t find Hulu, and NetFlicks being streamed outside the United States because of licensing issues, and second— it costs a lot of bandwidth to do that, but primarily it is because of licensing issues. It is why certain content on YouTube are restricted to certain markets.

And so people find ways to get their content. If they have to download it from BitTorrent they will. If they have to download it from somewhere else, they will.

Piracy of course will never be completely eradicated. Steve Jobs admitted for instance he had a whole collection of Bob Dylan bootlegs. This was during the days before the creation of the compact disk. The whole point of it all of course is that people who do create content ought to be compensated for that work to continue making more of that content, and the only way to do that is to get it on to people’s hands.

Many of those against SOPA and PIPA are saying this will kill the Internet. It effectively strikes at the very heart of the Internet's infrastructure--- the domain name service, which is like an address book for the Internet.

This is an American law that has international implications. It is effectively creating a great Amercian firewall and destroying what makes the Internet good for business, and for humanity.

The issue of copyright infringement is controversial. If there is anything the past decade has taught us is this. Copyright infringement is best fought not by draconian measures, but by giving consumers access to the content that they want when they want. As soon as Hollywood gets that, the sooner more money will flow in their direction.