Proposed Bill Attempts to Monitor Internet Theft: IP and Piracy Act Will Hinder Internet Freedom for Uploaders and Downloaders

By Jeremy Quintin

Elm Staff Writer

Every article I’ve written for The Elm has either been a review of music, about music, or the need for more music in our daily lives. Frankly it’s one of the few things that I can discuss without illustrating a severe lack of knowledge on my part. In spite of this, I’m going to broaden my horizons a bit here and tackle an issue that relates to music, but also has to do with different forms of media on the Internet as well as the general public’s freedom to access that media, which is now at the risk of dimishing.

There are two bills currently going through Congress that are dedicated to the protection of intellectual property (IP) on the internet. Intellectual property is copyright placement on music, movies, video games, and other similar forms of media that are not in physical form. One of the bills is known as the “Protect IP Act” in the Senate, and the “Stop Online Piracy Act” in the House. The first bill was the initial plan for dealing with intellectual copyright theft on the Internet, while the second was in an attempt to improve on the bill’s construction.  Not only do both risk the freedom of Internet users, but also the use of the Internet in general.

The breakdown on both of the bills is this: IP holders (production and label companies like Warner Brothers and Def Jam Records) will have permission to write to search engine sites like Google claiming that there are certain websites accessible through Google’s services which are providing ways to obtain the IP holder’s products without consent from the holder. Here “obtain” can be as simple as providing a link to another site or hosting the content without download.  If Google does not make the website inaccessible, then Google will be sued for “protecting” these malicious websites.

In reality Google is actually being sued for something they have no control nor responsibility over, since the content on other websites found through a search engine is not in the hands of the search provider. Yet this doesn’t matter to an IP holder who is more concerned about protecting their products than protecting a user’s Internet freedom.

Any search engine would be required to remove the site links found through it. This requirement is so strict that even companies like Mozilla would be required to remove access to website domain names through Firefox. This means typing a blacklisted website’s name in the address bar would lead to nowhere.

There is also no limitation on the IP holder as to how they determine what sites should be blacklisted, so long as they have some sort of substantial evidence that the site is conducting illegal conduct. Unfortunately, a recent one-sided court case by the French company Canal shows that over 200 websites can be shut down by obtaining evidence from just three of them. Plenty of websites are going to be left dead in the water without their knowing, as it is not a requirement of the bill to represent the offending website in a court of law.

The bill won’t even serve the direct purpose of its intent, which is to stop Internet piracy. Blocking easy access to pirating sites does not make them inaccessible, it just makes them harder to find. The Internet protocol address, or the actual location of the website, will still be there, and so people will still have ways to get around the new law. The end result is an Internet with restricted freedom, lousy service, and high as ever piracy rates. Just like with YouTube censoring videos, all that’s going to happen is people will look to another video site for what they want, thus not fixing the problem, but only sidetracking it.

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