-
Online piracy
Rights
and wronged
An
American
anti-piracy
bill
tries
to
stem
the
global
theft
of
intellectual property
1
、
ILLEGAL copying
and sharing of copyrighted material is hard enough
to stop
within a country. But when the
internet takes traffic across borders it is almost
unmanageable. American-owned
intellectual property, say, may be uploaded
in one country and downloaded in a
second, via a website whose computers
are
in
a
third,
operated
by
anonymous
enthusiasts
(or
criminals)
from
goodness-knows-where. So whom do you
sue, and in which courts? The Stop
Online
Piracy
Act
(SOPA),
now
before
America
’
s
Congress,
is
the
latest
of
many
recent attempts to defend property rights on the
internet.
2
、
The
bill
aims
to
cut
off
Americans
’
access
to
foreign
pirate
websites
by
squeezing intermediaries.
Rights-holders, such as Hollywood film studios,
will
be able to request that a credit-
card firm or advertising network stop doing
business with a foreign site; or ask a
search engine to take down links to the
site;
or
ask
an
internet-service
provider
to
block
the
site
’
s
domain
name,
making it harder to reach. The
intermediary then has just five days to comply
or rebut the complaint; after that the
rights-holder can go to court.
3
、
This would rope
intermediaries into law enforcement to an
unprecedented
degree, and give rights-
holders exceptional power
. Critics of
the bill say that
takedown requests and
court orders will swamp smaller firms and start-
ups.
They
say
that
blocking
entire
websites
via
their
domain
name
smacks
of
censorship, and that determined
downloaders will anyway find the block easy
to bypass.
4
、
Two mighty
coalitions have formed around SOPA. Supporting the
bill are not
only
film
studios
and
music
labels,
but
also
drug
firms
and
other
manufacturers.
Though
SOPA
itself
does
not
affect
them,
they
have
a
big
interest in fighting any kind of
intellectual-property infringement. On the other
side are internet companies, technology
investors and digital activists, who
share an interest in disrupting
business models and a dislike for anything that
smacks of old-fashioned regulation.
Online narcotics
5
、
Constantly
changing technology makes data on piracy
unreliable. Monitors
struggle to
distinguish the effect of deterrence from the rise
of easy, cheap
alternatives to
piratical downloading, such as legal online music
services. Nor
do they know how much
piracy has cut legal sales of music and films, and
how
much
blame
should
go
to
shifting
consumer
tastes.
But
the
fight
against
intellectual-property theft is waged
hard. It resembles a bit the fight against
illegal drugs: clamp down in one place,
and the trade sprouts elsewhere.
6
、
The Social
Science Research Council, an American non-profit
body, found in
a study this year
“
little
evidence
—
and indeed few
claims
—
that enforcement
efforts
to
date
have
had
any
impact
whatsoever
on
the
overall
supply
[of
pirated media].
”