SOPA and PIPA: ineffective approaches to online copyright infringement

SOPA, PIPA and Video Piracy

Recently Internet sites such as Wikipedia, Reddit and others shutdown for a day in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA). Both SOPA, in the U.S. House of Representatives and PIPA in the U.S. Senate are legislative efforts designed to stop overseas websites from infringing on copyrights and to prevent Internet users from accessing those sites (Mason). These bills are controversial for a number of reasons and have generated a substantial deal of debate. This paper will examine this legislation and support the assertion that is not an effective way to resolve this issue.

According to movie industry video piracy is a global problem. A report prepared by L.E.K. ("The Cost of Movie Piracy"), an international consulting firm, for the Motion picture Association of America (MPA) claimed the major U.S. motion picture studios lost $6.1 billion in 2005 to piracy worldwide. Eighty percent of those losses were the result of piracy overseas. Sixty-two percent of the $6.1 billion were from the piracy of hard goods such as DVDs while thirty-eight percent was from Internet piracy. Furthermore, the worldwide motion picture industry, including foreign and domestic producers, distributors, theaters, video stores and pay-per-view operations, lost $18.2 billion. The typical pirate is age 16-24 and male. Forty-four percent of MPA losses in the U.S. are attributable to college students.

Initially both SOPA and PIPA provided two methods for keeping foreign websites from copyright infringement. One means by which this was to be accomplished was to enable the U.S. Justice Department to seek court orders requiring Internet service providers to block domain names of infringing sites. However this provision provoked a major concern among Interne security experts because of the possibility of "…cybersecurity problems as Web users attempt to bypass the blocks" (Gross). Moreover, opponents to this legislation worry that this provision could lead to legitimate speech being blocked. Both SOPA and PIPA have dropped this method. The other method would allow rights holders to seek court orders requiring payment providers, advertisers, and search engines to stop doing business with an infringing site. In essence rights holders could request that funding be cut off from an infringing site and that search links be removed (Mason).

In December of 2011 founders of Twitter, Google, You Tube and others published an open letter declaring that SPOA and PIPA would enable Internet regulation and censorship equivalent to the government regulation in China and Iran. They also claimed that the bills would stifle online innovation, violate the First Amendment, and compromise the integrity of the Internet naming system. To emphasize the point on January 18, 2012 opponents of the bills staged a 24-hour shutdown of their websites. In the aftermath of this protest two Republicans, senators Marco Rubio and John Cornyn rescinded their support of the PIPA legislation. Mr. Rubio had co-sponsored the bill. The House took steps to slow legislation as well ("Copyrights and Internet Piracy").

Ultimately the conflict comes down to the competing interests of the Internet Industry and the media giants in Hollywood and New York. The problem is reaching a common understanding on how to fight piracy. Many dispute the MPAs assessment of the magnitude of the problem. In February of 2012 an organization concerned with digital rights, Public Knowledge, assembled a coalition of over 70 tech companies and advocacy groups including Amnesty International, Consumers Unions, Reddit, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation called for congress to rethink their approach. "Now is the time for Congress to take a breath, step back, and approach the issue from a fresh perspective." The letter expressed the concerns of a wide variety of people including technologists, law professors, international human rights groups, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and individual Internet users. The group claimed that the issues raised by SOPA and PIPA were "too fundamental and too numerous to be fully addressed through hasty revisions of these bills" ("Public Knowledge Letter to Congress").