Information Technology Copyright Issues There Is No

Information Technology Copyright Issues

There is no doubt that the digital revolution ushered forward by the computer and Internet age has changed myriad aspects of contemporary society. In addition to significant social and cultural changes and the evolution of political discourse on a global basis, the digital revolution has also profoundly changed the landscape of centuries of established legal principles that pertain to the proprietary ownership and protection of original intellectual property (Halbert & Ingulli, 2009). At the time that modern laws of copyright, trademark, and the very definition of intellectual property were created and defined as legal concepts the prospect of their light-speed transmission and storage in vast quantities by ephemeral entities that exist mainly in cyberspace were completely outside of the scope of contemplation by legislators and intellectual property creators alike.

As a result, the first two decades of the Internet age have witnessed legal disputes arising from the unauthorized copying and dissemination of intellectual property in ways that unquestionably violate the spirit of the protections that intellectual property laws were obviously meant to confer. The fundamental problem is that the legal systems and case law have not yet evolved sufficiently to extend the same types of protection to intellectual property in the cyber medium that have traditionally protected intellectual property in printed and other hard-copy formats for hundreds of years (Halbert & Ingulli, 2009).

Understanding the Fundamental Issues Presented by the Cyber Medium

A perfect example of the extent to which existing legal protections against unauthorized use and dissemination of intellectual property are the ongoing legal disputes between producers of intellectual property and entities such as Google, Megaupload, Youtube, and Hulu.com that enable Internet users to upload and store the intellectual property of movie and music producers (in particular) in formats that enable their widespread sharing, copying, and dissemination by countless individual consumers without any financial compensation to the producers of those intellectual properties (Bagley & Savage, 2005; Halbert & Ingulli, 2009).

Traditional principles and well-settled case law of intellectual property strictly prohibit the unauthorized copying, sharing, or dissemination of the intellectual property of others without the express authorization of the creator or author of the intellectual property (Bagley & Savage, 2005; Halbert & Ingulli, 2009). However, long after the laws, concepts, and definitions comprised by modern intellectual property law were developed, the Internet medium provided a new means of violating virtually all of those legal protections in spirit but without actually violating any of the actual literal elements of that body of law.

Initially, the problem that computer technology first introduced were mainly technical issues of detection, identification of wrongdoers, and prevention (Halbert & Ingulli, 2009). This first generation of intellectual property protection dilemmas involved the deliberate transfer of music and motion picture files, such as through Internet sites created to facilitate those types of transfers between paying consumers who purchased copyrighted media and other consumers who did not pay for copies of those forms of entertainment. To a large extent, technical solutions allowed the entities that rightfully owned that intellectual property to develop the necessary means to identify unauthorized file sharers and to establish in traditional legal forums that existing intellectual property law was directly applicable to unauthorized file sharing through the new Internet communications medium (Bagley & Savage, 2005; Halbert & Ingulli, 2009).

However, the current battle over intellectual property rights and copyright infringement are much more complicated and less easily resolved through existing statutes and other legal concepts and definitions. That is especially true in connection with the modern trend of providing the technical means of allowing individuals to upload or store intellectual property on the Internet where it can be readily accessed by others without any compensation to the owner of the intellectual property.

The Case of Megaupload

Perhaps the best illustration of the current dilemma faced by producers of valuable intellectual property is the situation involving the series of businesses under the umbrella of the Megaupload organization. Specifically, MegaPorn, MegaVideo, MegaLive, MegaPix, and Megaupload are websites created by Kim Schmitz, a former West German citizen who was previously convicted in Germany of computer hacking and insider stock trading a decade ago (Sandoval, 2011). Schmitz, who actually legally changed his name to "Kim Dotcom," founded the series of Internet businesses in 2005 (Sandoval, 2011).

The actual service that his organization furnishes to users is known as "cyberlockers" consisting of virtual "space" (in essence, Internet bandwidth) for storing entertainment media. The businesses never actually take part in transferring intellectual property from any individual to any other individual (Sandoval, 2011). Rather, they permit (and encourage) users to upload or store entertainment media that actually represent the intellectual property of their creators and authors in a medium from where other users can freely consume that media without ever compensating the rightful owner of copyrights and other intellectual property rights for that use (Sandoval, 2011).

The fundamental problem from the perspective of the rightful owners of the intellectual property stored in this fashion is that, unlike the earlier version of Internet piracy (such as Napster), the entities that enable this process do not actually participate in any transfer that is expressly prohibited by existing intellectual property law (Halbert & Ingulli, 2009). To date, the argument that these services impliedly violate those established principles have not been fully litigated in any court of law. The U.S. Senate is currently considering proposed legislation to protect intellectual copyright owners from violations in connection with foreign entities, but even those measures deal principally with the unauthorized transfer of counterfeit media and not the type of problem facing intellectual property owners in connection with Megaupload and similar ventures (Sandoval, 2011).