Stopping online piracy by disregarding constitutional rights

Stopping online piracy by disregarding constitutional rights.

 

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In the US, we have the right to freedom of speech and a fair trial. Sometimes though, there are points where the government, in the interest of the people, tries to disregard rights to more efficiently stop criminal activity. Currently there is a bill being reviewed in congress* that would give intellectual property right holders (and if the website is in another country, the US Courts) the ability to remove advertising programs and block access to credit card payments to an online site that has content that violates Intellectual Property Rights, no questions asked.

While it may have good intentions it has many possibilities for abuse and more to the point, not only can it easily be abused, it is decidedly unconstitutional.

 

In the bill, Intellectual Property Rights/copyright law and “Online Piracy” are often used interchangeably. So what are Intellectual Property Rights? The definition of “Intellectual property right” falls under a very wide banner of interpretations. Including but not limited to; musical, literary and artistic works, discoveries and inventions, words and phrases, trademarks, patents, industrial design rights and trade secrets. Many of these have a wide definition themselves.

 

Piracy then, is the illegal downloading and uploading of any of the aforementioned things.

That being said, let’s get some statistics about who pirates, what is pirated, how often and why. The following data comes from a study by The American Assembly project at Columbia University in New York.(1) Researchers surveyed 2,303 U.S. adults by phone during the month of August on a whole host of copyright-related questions. Piracy, it seems, is fairly common. Roughly 46% of American adults have bought pirated DVDs, copied files or disks from friends or family, or downloaded music, TV shows or movies for free. The rate also drops at a steady rate based on progression of age. That is, the older the person in the study was, the less likely they were to have pirated.

 

Similarly, substantial majorities of Americans say it is “reasonable” to share music files with family members (75%) and friends (56%). For movie/TV files: 70% and 54% respectively. Although I’m quick to point out that while 75% may say it’s reasonable to share music with family, it doesn’t imply that they have. For that matter, only 40% say they have pirated music and 20% with movies, and again, the percentages decrease as age rises. However, while the numbers appear to be very high, only 2% of Americans are heavy music pirates (more than 1,000 songs) and only 1% are heavily involved in TV/Movie piracy. (100 or more) There also seems to be a correlation with legal “streaming”* services. Of the people that said they had illegally downloaded or listened to media, 53% said they now do so less because of the emergence of these legal services. To clarify, many people disregard copyright law but they generally don’t do it regularly.

 

While organizations can currently sue most blatant copyright infringing sites into oblivion, case of Napster, sites from countries such as the Netherlands can disregard US law because it is not within our jurisdiction. So by  targeting the website host, advertising programs and blocking credit card payments through sites like Paypal, mastercard and visa (all of which do fall under US law) they can effectively shut down the international sites instead of targeting them directly.

 

Here is where it gets unconstitutional. Intellectual Property Right holders or Internet Service Providers could block US based users from accessing sites that violate copyright law. The potential for abuse is enormous. Take YouTube for example. The vast majority of content on there might be legal, but there are some illegal “pirated” movies, songs and more that violate Intellectual Property Rights, also known as copyright law. So an ISP could choose to block their users at will as long as they have one instance of violated intellectual property rights.

 

IPR holders on the other hand are given the ability to remove advertising programs and block access to credit card payments to any US based website that is determined to have content that violates copyright law.

 

To use a metaphor, it allows any holder of intellectual property rights the ability to, in effect, block anyone from entering a city based on the fact that there are areas of the city where criminals congregate. The reasoning for this being that if anyone could interact with the criminals or their crimes, then no one should be allowed the opportunity. (2)

In the words of John Stuart Mill, "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”      

Are citizens not doing anything illegal causing harm to anyone by being a part of a community that has people committing crimes? In this case, the government seems to think so.

 

 

What is even more frightening than giving vast censoring power to independent corporations and copyright holders, is the fact that the basis for what the bill tries to accomplish, reducing piracy through censorship, is in its own words;

 

“No later than 2 years after this Act is set into place, the Register of Copyrights shall submit to the House of Representatives and the Senate a report containing an analysis of the significant harm inflicted by copyright infringers on consumers, businesses, and intellectual property industries in the United States and abroad.” (3)

 

On a basic level what this means is that they are going to get the data to base this act on after it’s passed

 

Now of course there are going to be very large factors in support and contribution and on the opposite side, organizations against it.

 

On the “Support For” side, there are 37 public interests who’ve contributed money to Senators and Representatives for a rounded total of 7,000,000$ and a total of 61 organizations supporting it, which include orgs such as the RIAA, NPAA Nike, Viacom, Walmart, Comcast, Nintendo, Adidas, The NFL, Walt Disney, CBS, Ford, Microsoft, and the Motion Picture Association of America.(4)(5)

 

Of those Opposing the bill there are 8 public interests who’ve contributed money to Senators and Representatives for a total of 5,000,000 and a total of 17 organizations opposing it. Some of which include Google, Yahoo, Human Rights Watch, Visa, American Express and the American Association of Law Libraries. (4)(5)

 

In conclusion, the bill censors the internet with enough flexibility to allow large abuse of power, it will affect people not doing anything wrong, it also violates the freedom of speech and the basis that our founding fathers built this very nation on. All of this to stop a minority of internet users that are violating copyright law, even when we still don’t know how much damage the pirates are actually doing. Many people have voiced their opinions against it, including Oregon’s Senator Ron Wyden. Despite this the bill still has a rather high chance of passing, though in my opinion if it had any chance of passing it would still be too much.

 

 

 

 

 

Annotated Bibliography

 

1.      http://piracy.ssrc.org/the-copy-culture-survey-infringement-and-enforcement-in-the-us/

 

2.      U.S. Congressional bill, SOPA, 10/26/2011 sect. 104 pg. 25, “Private sector system to protect U.S customers and prevent U.S. funding of sites dedicated to theft of U.S. property.

 

3.      U.S. Congressional bill, SOPA, 10/26/2011 sect. 108 pg. 52 “Denying U.S. capital to notorious infringers” part A1 & B2

 

4.      http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s968/money

 

5.      http://maplight.org/us-congress/bill/112-s-968/954311/total-contributions

 

*U.S. Congressional Bill, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act)

 

**Streaming; Streaming video is content sent in compressed form over the Internet and displayed by the viewer in real time. With streaming video or music , a Web user does not have to wait to download a file to play it. Instead, the media is sent in a continuous stream of data and is played as it arrives.

 

[ Full text of the bill can be found here; http://static.arstechnica.net/2011/10/26/SOPA.pdf  Or here;

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/text ]