Essay on Online Piracy: The Folly of a Blacklist

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

In the global market that we leave in companies are trying to find any and everyway that they can to get ahead in their respective markets. This most of the time brings out the most innovate thinkers that can come up with a way to keep it’s company on top of their market and sometimes we see that there are companies that like to take a short cut by using non legal and malicious methods. According to Lewis, (1985), Software piracy is the illicit copying of the operating instructions and applications programs, which make computers work, is a large and growing industry. The Pirate Bay is part of a European social and political movement that opposes copyrighted content and demands that music, videos, TV shows, and other digital content be free and unrestricted. In the words of the Pirate Party, “the Pirate Bay is a unique platform for distributing culture between regular people and independent artists, and that’s something we want to preserve.”

An article by Anna Jo Bratton, Associated Press, describes well the dangers of my topic: piracy. In the article, Bratton reported a recent legal matter that impacted Sarah Barg, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln sophomore, and her colleges. The RIAA, an anti-piracy and plagiarism society had suspected that many students at the university had been illegally downloading media content. Burg received an email concerning the matter, but she was ignorant and considered it a fluke or scam. The email suggested that she had supposedly downloaded a whopping 381 songs. The letter continued to say that a lawsuit was possible, but they offered here an opportunity to avoid that circumstance. They requested of her $3,000, or $7.87 per song. Sarah, still

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

SOPA, PIPA, and CISPA: though different, these bills were all presented with a similar goal in mind. These bills were intended to stop the digital copyright infringement of American intellectual properties, mainly in foreign countries, but the overly vague wording in the bills made it hard to decipher their real intentions (Yu). For a multitude of reasons, these bills were staunchly protested not only by American citizens, but they also received protest from numerous international groups (York). Though some may argue that SOPA, PIPA, or CISPA may have had some value, they did not have the intended result of ending digital theft, but rather invigorated a retaliating movement. The main

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.

The broad base of support for this bill shows that Congress recognizes the urgent need to help our private sector better defend itself from these insidious attacks,” said CISPA sponsor Rep. Mike Rogers in a statement published on his website(Rogers-Ruppersberger Representative pg. 1). Even with all the hype of it being a positive thing, CISPA falls far short of solving such an important issue.

The Stop Online Piracy Act died when a massive groundswell of public outcry convinced a number of legislators who previously supported the bill to drop their support (O'Brien, 2012). The death of SOPA could not have come too soon. The bill was ill-conceived, and fundamentally-flawed on a number of different levels. Killing SOPA before it became law was the only logical thing to do. The companies that have come to be known collectively as "Big Content", however, are going to keep trying to dupe Congress into protecting their outmoded business model at the expense of free market capitalism and American values. Already, a new act called CISPA is working its way through Congress, containing many of the same flaws that SOPA contained (Little, 2012). It is time for Americans to stand up to Big Content and its desire to undermine America's spirit of free enterprise, and say "NO" to all of these rights-infringing bills.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a U.S. House of Representatives bill with the stated purpose, "To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes." (1) SOPA proposes to accomplish those goals by allowing the U.S. Department of Justice and copyright owners to take action against websites thought to be facilitating copyright infringement.

Online piracy is commonly referred to as a threat to businesses in the creative industries. The WTO Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (a.k.a. “the TRIPS” agreement) defines piracy as:

We all know that downloading pirated music and films is illegal, but what exactly is it? The term piracy refers to the copying and selling of music, films and other media illegally; in other words you are copying and selling copyrighted media without the permission of the original owner (NiDirect, n.d.). With the massive growth of the internet and its ability to store and capture vast amounts of data, we have become much more reliable on information systems in all aspects of life, but it does not come without the risk of information technology being used unethically. With the number of IT breakthroughs in recent years “the importance of ethics and human values has been underemphasised” often resulting in various consequences. Not surprisingly one of the many public concerns about the ethical use of IT is that “millions of people have downloaded music and movies at no charge and in apparent violation of copyright laws at tremendous expense to the owners of those copyrights” (Reynolds, Ethics in Information Technology, 2015). This essay covers the ethical issues of downloading pirated music and films and the impact it has on music corporations and recording and film companies.

Producers of musical content cannot undo the adverse effects that piracy has had on the industry. Because of the internet and the way individuals have manipulated it to obtain music, many people are unwilling to change their habits. Here lies the issue between the producer and the consumer. Acts like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) work against the incentive of many consumers by telling them that they cannot do what maximizes their utility. Producers are thus working against the likings of the consumer. This is wrong.

The rise of the Internet era opened the whole new market for traditional media full of opportunities as well as threats. Online piracy being one of them because the music and film industry loses £5.4bn in a year and if it was reduced by 10% it could have created up to 13 thousand jobs in the UK. There are various attempts taken to fight with online piracy; a case study of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement will be considered as well as other legislations attempting to regulate copyrights in the Internet. This

Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) were big bills recently in the EU and America that caught the attention of nearly every internet user. It was hard to not notice these two bills. These legislations would have pushed copyright infringement on many sites and much of the internet as it is known would have been shut down. On January 18, big sites such as Wikipedia, and Google blacked out their site for a day. This sent a loud and clear message to the creators of this bill and they put it on indefinite hold. While this was happening another bill decided to raise its ugly head. It had been lurking in the shadows of the other two bills and would prove to be a much more immense monster to face. Much like

On January 23, 2003, the world’s leading computer networking equipment maker Cisco Systems, headquartered in San Jose California, filed a lawsuit against China-based Huawei Technologies and its United States subsidiaries Huawei America and FutureWei Technologies. In the lawsuit, Cisco alleged that Huawei stole intellectual property by copying its Internet Operating System (IOS) software and its copyrighted user manuals. Cisco also claimed that Huawei infringed on its patents. After numerous failed attempts to resolve these complaints directly with Huawei, which included a cease and desist letter to one of Huawei’s United Kingdom distributors, Cisco decided that a lawsuit was necessary to