Author: Henry Dickmeyer
Today, the U.S. lives in an age where illegal pirating may seem trivial to most people, but the downsizing of major companies like Barnes & Noble and Blockbuster reflect a time where, in fact, through the power of the web, it’s common to digitally view a movie and receive a copy of an album both before and after it has been released for private ownership. As simple as it is for today’s generation to contact piracy centers – online providers established solely for the input and output of illegal content – it’s just as simple to share content. Consider the facts: YouTube presides over 48 hours of uploaded material per minute, 156 million public blogs are currently in existence, and Facebook’s 840 million users amount to a population greater than that of the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil combined. It’s not easy to deny that today’s world enjoys finding content and sharing it, whether it belongs to them or not.
So from January 17th-20th, the social media’s buzz about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (PROTECT IP Act) came as no surprise to a population of liberal web users. In contrast to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which made users responsible for pirated content, SOPA and PIPA would reach further. Instead of notifying the patrons of pirated content, the bills established what NYU professor Clark Shirky referred to as the “guilty until proven innocent” approach: rather than going after guilty users, hosting sites and search engines faced the consequences. Penalties for sites included monetary fines and the threat of IP address removal.
While the bills targeted “rogue” piracy centers, they were instead poorly designed enforcement mechanisms. They sought to macro manage a vast online world where issues relating to piracy can’t be dealt with by wiping out the blog of a user whose commenter’s post illicit material, removing a site from Google’s search results, or making Flickr and Tumblr liable for its user’s pirated content. SOPA and PIPA view issues without a magnifying glass, and this approach – in the age of sharing creativity and experiences – is in itself problematic.
The world is much different today than it was in the 90s. The Internet now holds twice the amount of information it held in 1998, when the DMCA treated piracy like middle-school detention. The world was smaller, as the sharing tools of Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube were newly formed websites. The late 90s was just the beginning of an unforeseen era where the web would become less of a resource and more of a center for democratically shared ideas.
As information spread, the entity of the web began to take shape. The string of 2011’s revolutionary movements – a year where revolts, riots, and political outcry stretched from the burning Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia to the west edges of Zuccotti Park – would’ve been unheard of 15 years ago. In fact, Egypt’s January rebellion was dubbed the “Facebook Revolution.”
While the Internet created a network within the revolutionized country, the rest of the world could watch and empathize. Last year’s uprisings can be marked as somewhat of a capstone for the implementation of the web’s role in our lives. A bill strictly limiting this openness without regard for its benefits doesn’t do the world of the Internet justice. Sharing ideas has identified our generation in a way that SOPA and PIPA can’t afford to dismiss.
The ubiquitous opposition to SOPA and PIPA led to the bills’ tabling on January 20th. If the response signifies anything, it is a call that dealing with piracy cannot occur on a grand scale. Laws punishing sites that don’t have the sole purpose of piracy won’t work today. A bipartisan proposal was introduced to Congress on January 18th called the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN). OPEN is designed to punish piracy centers, not sites with pirated content; and as opposed to penalizing search engines, service providers, and threatening jobs in those sectors, OPEN cuts off advertisers and payment companies to those “piracy centers.” The bill is a smart way to surface piracy as an issue without threatening beneficial Internet centers.
OPEN is a middle path. While it a more lenient proposal than SOPA or PIPA, it targets the sources of piracy more so than the scent of it. The bill understands that the country values its online freedom and believes in the cooperation of the Internet’s pervasive nature with online governing. It is difficult to monitor where that information goes, but SOPA and PIPA jumped the gun in the fight against piracy. The responses from web giants and the proposition of OPEN were definite: we will defend creativity, we will defend the spread of ideas, and we will work to improve the legal conditions to do so.
Henry Dickmeyer is an undeclared first-year. He can be reached at dickmeyer@oxy.edu.
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