Freedom: Digital and Literal Essay

Piracy has become a major issue in the United States. For every motion picture that has been featured in theaters also has been pirated onto the Internet the next day, and for every new musical album that is released, yet there is a free torrent file of the album within the same hour. Even though these online pirates steal music and movies from other companies and make a drastic profit, yet these “rogue” websites receive 53 billions visits a year from across the globe according to Creative America. The persistence of the thieves that break copyright laws of the productions has lead the entertainment business to place a definitive complaint to the U.S. government of the constant notion of piracy. While the notion of piracy was not left

It is important to know the history of the internet. The internet is a worldwide network of computer systems that are connected to each other by cables (Howe, 2012). The internet first started out as a military experiment. In 1957, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was created by the United States department of Defense (Computer History Museum, 2004). The project was started after the Russians launched a satellite into space for communication reasons. The satellite was called SPUTNIK (Computer History Museum, 2004). It was rumored that President Eisenhower got worried and decided to get the United States to launch its own satellite. They recruited Dr. Joseph C. Licklider of MIT, was made head of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO)(Computer History Museum, 2004). Their purpose of the project was to focus on improving the military use of computer information.

I’m afraid that the issues that had to do with the rights for creators of content (authors of music, books, papers, etc.) to be able to profit from their work without being deprived of their livelihoods due to piracy, was confounded due to the ignorance of law makers about the nature of the Internet (the free flow of ideas, the ability to collaborate with people from all over the world and engage in thoughtful discourse and debate, etc.). Further, the influence of money and pressure being brought upon the government to pass the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) by very wealthy and influential organizations (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_with_official_stances_on_the_SOPA_and_PIPA ) created undue pressure to get Congress to act without thoughtful investigation into the

The Internet is, quite literally, a network of networks. It is comprised of ten thousands of interconnected networks spanning the globe. The computers that form the Internet range from huge mainframes in research establishments to modest PCs in people's homes and offices. Despite the recent hype, the Internet is not a new phenomenon. Its roots lie in a collection of computers that were linked together in the 1970s to form the US Department of Defense's communications systems. Fearing the consequences of nuclear attack, there was no central computer holding vast amounts of data, rather the information was dispersed across thousands of machines. A set of rules, of protocols, known as TCP/IP was

Luckily, this bill foresaw possible issues and made sure to specifically state in section 230 that ISPs (internet service providers) and websites hosting content were not to be held directly responsible for information posted by other users. However in some places it overstepped its boundaries by placing unfair restrictions on speech within the internet, therefore it was deemed unconstitutional in 1997. In 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed. This act prohibits the distribution and hosting of services that hold or use copyrighted material unlawfully, however even if no infringing material is hosted – if some form of circumvention is in place the host is held liable. This act gave the entertainment industry extreme power, which has become a major issue in recent years. For example, on sites such as YouTube (founded 2005) entire videos can be removed from claims by entertainment providers, like record companies. Oftentimes these removals are completely unlawful and violate fair use – however, nothing has been done in the terms of stopping the providers. One can dispute a claim, but more often than not there is a robot in place on the other end who will continue to re-instate the claim indefinitely, preventing the “infringing” party from appealing the

Another new trend changing the world is the Internet. The Internet has revolutionized everyone’s daily lives. From a foreign policy

Today, society is affected by the many advances in technology. These advances affect almost every person in the world. One of the prevalent advances in technology was the invention and mass use of the Internet. Today more than ever, people around the world use the Internet to support their personal and business tasks on a daily basis. The Internet is a portal into vast amounts of information concerning almost every aspect of life including education, business, politics, entertainment, social networking, and world security. (idebate.com) Although the Internet has become a key resource in developing the world, the mass use of Internet has highlighted a major problem, privacy and the protection of individual, corporate, and even government

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) was a bill proposed in the House of Representatives that aimed to tackle the growing problem of online piracy and copyright infringement. It targets foreign-based websites that contain any form of unauthorized copyright-infringing material such as movies or music by giving content-creators the right to stop any US businesses from providing payment services, advertising, or even dealing with prosecuted websites; essentially blacklisting and hiding these websites to any US visitors. The bill is split into two main sections: “Combating Online Piracy”, which provides tools for rights holders to protect their content, and “Additional Enhancements to Combat Intellectual Property Theft.”, which criminal law which as applies to intellectual property rights and increases punishments for leaking government information. SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) was not enacted because of very strong opposing public opinion, its highly broad and unconstitutional policies that restricted speech, and presidential leadership against the bill.

Tim Berners-Lee said “Freedom of connection with any application to any party is the fundamental social basis of the internet. And now, is the basis of the society built on the internet.” Net Neutrality has been around since the beginning of internet. It is the reason the internet is open and free for anyone to use without, blocking, degradation, and discrimination. It has been the main driving force for up and coming artists, new small businesses, and people with fresh and great ideas. It has made the internet effortless and accessible without charging outrageous fees for a faster lane or having to ask for permission to use visuals, video, or audio. It

The World Wide Web was first created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, under the philosophy that it would begin as, and remain, an “open and free” platform of expression. It was believed that a neutral [open] web could promote innovation and development of technologies in an environment where individuals’ speech and collaboration overpowered large corporations. Recently, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have jeopardized the open nature of the web by opposing net neutrality, the idea that “all data on the internet should be treated equally by corporations, such as internet service providers, and governments, regardless of content, user, platform, application or device.”

What Sandra Schmitz was writing about was a brief review of what the Protect Internet Providers Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was about. In short, both acts would let internet providers, Time Warner, Comcast, Verizon, ect. Powers to remove certain websites from accessing certain foreign websites that are known to harbor infringing copyright content such as movies, TV shows, and music. With those overseas sites distributing this infringed content, the US government decided to try and pass certain acts like PIPA and SOPA in order to stop these certain websites to stop serving such content in their country. Schmitz explains in vast detail what PIPA and SOPA are and how they are detrimental to everyone who has access to the internet.

around Internet copyright like music, books, and movies. As a result, there have been many attempts at protecting copyright on the Internet. 2 The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was a controversial United States bill introduced by U.S. Representative Lamar S. Smith (R-TX) to expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement to combat online copyright infringement and online trafficking in counterfeit goods. The Protect IP Act (PIPA) was a proposed law with the stated goal of giving the US government and copyright holders additional tools to curb access to “rogue websites dedicated to the sale of infringing or counterfeit goods,” especially those registered outside the U.S. Some people think copyright laws should be stricter because it has become so

Such policy seems to be working with plagiarism at e.g. Universities, but in term of intellectual property the intangible aspect of the product makes it more difficult to control. Therefore stopping online piracy is easier said than done, as it would require enormous human resources from a government to track down illegal websites and taking a legal action against them leading to the closure. One case study worth following regarding this issue was on the major streaming website TV SHACK.net has been seized many times by the US government and it kept changing the domain addresses to overseas addresses as .co or .bz. The owner, 23 year old student Richard O’Dwyer from Sheffield has been charged with copyright infringement and the US Justice Department has been seeking to extradite him from the UK since May 2011 – BBC reports. Streaming itself is a grey area in many countries, i.e. Germany, where it is not perceived as downloading but has been sourced using illegal means. Compared with the legal issues and the fact that the content was stored on foreign servers the law enforcement was extremely difficult, but now it has been set an example worldwide of tackling with piracy. On entering the internet address now a video clip displays which in a humoristic educated people on what piracy is and how much a “free” movie really cost. Such attempt is one of the suggested ways in dealing with piracy through

Perhaps one of the greatest inventions of out time is the Internet. Without a doubt, the net has had a profound effect on almost every aspect of our lives. The formation of the Internet has changed the way we do business, communicate, entertain, retrieve information, and even educate ourselves. Nevertheless, the Internet might have never materialized if it had not been for some innovated thinkers from the Advanced Research Project Agency, who created "ARPANET." In collaboration with several educational and research institutions, the agency created the packet-switching technologies that form the basis of the Internet today.

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support electronic mail.