SOPA and PIPA could change Internet culture

The high seas of the Internet are becoming a dangerous place for pirates.

Several big arrests… The high seas of the Internet are becoming a dangerous place for pirates.

Several big arrests and anti-piracy legislation such as the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act are threatening not only copyright violators, but many Internet conventions as well.  All of this could have an effect on the way people share and create online. But according to industry giants like the Recording Industry Association of America, these bills could help legal media industries flourish and allow space for new talents.

SOPA and PIPA are similar bills currently in the House and Senate, respectively. Both bills are intended to limit copyright infringement on the Web by shutting down sites providing links to pirated material.

The bills have met considerable resistance in the technological community, forcing many of their supporters to reconsider the backings. “Rather than prematurely bringing the PROTECT IP Act to the Senate floor, we should first study and resolve the serious issues that come with this legislation,” said Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in a press conference.

The bills would give copyright holders and media conglomerates increased power to legally pursue perpetrators of copyright infringement.

Copyright holders currently use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to go after sites hosting their content. Under this law, owners can issue take-down notices to community websites onto which users have uploaded copyrighted content. For instance, YouTube frequently takes down clips from movies or recently released songs at the request of conglomerates like EMI.

Higher-ups in the industry believe that piracy has a huge impact on their business. RIAA representatives declined to comment, but directed all questions to their website. According to the association’s website, part of the consequences of illegal file-sharing come from the fact that although the reach of music is widespread, the industry “by business standards is relatively small.” The website blames piracy issues for the loss of thousands of industry jobs and explains further how pirating can hurt the artists themselves.

“The successful partnership between a music label and a global superstar — and the revenue generated — finances the investment in discovering, developing and promoting the next new artist. Without that revolving door of investment and revenue, the ability to bring the next generation of artists to the marketplace is diminished, as is the incentive for the aspiring artist to make music a full-time professional career,” RIAA’s website said.

Under SOPA, even sites that comply with copyright laws can be sued. Essentially, any site that steals U.S. goods, has users in the U.S. or uses copyright infringement as a means of delivering content could be in danger. This means that if a site such as Facebook is designed to enable users to share information, then Facebook may be labeled as an offending site according to the bill because information on Facebook could infringe on copyrights..

Technology writer Clay Shirky oversees the policing of individual speech as a direct consequence of these restrictions.

“The biggest content producers on the Internet are not Google and Yahoo, they’re us. We’re the people getting policed,”  said Shirky, who studies the effect of the Internet on society and has published two books on related subjects.

SOPA and PIPA both focus on giving copyright holders the ability to order severe sanctions against violating websites. A commonly cited analogy is that if a store were making fake DVDs, copyright owners would now have the authority to order banks to stop processing the business’s money, have the police shut down its storefront and have the store removed from all maps.

Removing websites from these online maps, known as Domain Name System lists, has proved to be especially controversial.

DNS lists translate the human-readable words like “google.com” into computer IP addresses like “75.125.113.106,” which connect users to websites. SOPA and PIPA give media conglomerates the authority to have websites removed from these lists, rendering them invisible to common users.

“The functional setup of such site blocking via DNS blocking is effectively identical to how the Great Firewall of China works. While the intended purpose is obviously different, the actual mechanism for blocking is nearly identical,” Michael Masnick, CEO of Techdirt, said of SOPA’s technical capabilities. Techdirt is an Internet group that delivers news and sparks discussion on technical issues.

The Web’s international scope means that these measures are especially damaging to U.S.-based websites. While users in the United States will have a hard time accessing certain sites, international users should still be able to look up the sites’ addresses on unmodified DNS lists.

What concerns copyright experts like Masnick the most is the potential for SOPA to stifle free speech. He cited how the Russian government’s use of anti-piracy raids on environmental and other advocacy groups has allowed police to seize the work of government critics.

“Even if the intended purpose of SOPA and PIPA are to protect against infringement, opening up the door to censorship for one purpose makes it nearly impossible to avoid it being used for other purposes,” Masnick said.

Entrepreneurs are also threatened by the new legislation. SOPA includes terms which oblige sites to pay the legal fees of suing companies if they lose the lawsuits in court. Since a claim under SOPA would be able to be made over something as simple as a link in a site’s comment section, the resulting increase in start-ups’ legal costs could impede their growth.

Masnick cites a study by management consulting firm Booz & Company. The study — financed by Google Inc., which has opposed the bill — found that more than 70 percent of angel investors — persons who invest in start-up ventures — would be deterred from investing in “user uploaded” websites if laws like SOPA and PIPA were passed. As the first large investments many tech start-ups receive are from these affluent individuals, the loss of angel investors’ confidence might be crippling to new online businesses.

Some argue that anti-piracy tools are strong enough without measures like SOPA. The day after the anti-SOPA blackout, organized last week by Internet giants including Wikipedia and Reddit, the prominent file-sharing site Megaupload — home to the oft-student-used Megavideo — went offline as its operators were arrested in New Zealand. They face criminal charges in the United States for the $175 million in ad and membership revenue the site generated while hosting copyrighted material.

This is not the only case in which U.S. companies have sought the extradition of foreigners with few connections to the United States on piracy charges.

Richard O’Dwyer, a British college student who operated the file-linking site TVShack, faces extradition on similar charges of copyright infringement. TVShack provided links to illegal content hosted on other sites and had no formal ties to the U.S. But the .net in the site’s URL is routed through VeriSign Inc., a company based in Virginia, and a British court found these circumstances enough to justify O’Dwyer’s extradition..

Technology writers like Tony Bradley of PCWorld see these high-profile arrests as evidence that current copyright legislation is enough.

“If the government is already capable of taking down a website without due legal process and enlisting the cooperation of international law enforcement to arrest its key members on foreign soil, what exactly do we need additional legislation for?,” Bradley wrote in a Jan. 20 post on the website.