The Intellectual Property Rights Dilemma
If you use the internet, watch TV, listen to the radio, or generally consume any media, you have heard about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). On January 18 Wikipedia and about 7000 other websites went dark to protest this legislation. A large number of Internet companies, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and AOL, published a statement in the New York Times stating they were "concerned that these measures pose a serious risk to our industry's continued track record of innovation and job-creation, as well as to our Nation's cybersecurity." The out pouring of criticism shelved SOPA for now, but more legislation is forthcoming.
The truth is that we (as individuals and as a country) need to be able to protect our intellectual property. Billions of dollars in revenue (and taxes) are lost on illegal sharing, disseminating, and streaming of copyright material. This is not only a monetary issue; it affects the stability of companies and jobs in those industries victimized. Flaws in the current copyright laws give the U.S. very little right to enforce copyright laws against foreign websites and internet service providers.
While copyright laws must be updated and strengthened, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is really just a stop gap measure to combat intellectual theft.
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a United States bill introduced by U.S. Representative Lamar S. Smith to give the U.S. law enforcement the ability to combat the theft of copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. The bill provides the right to request that advertising networks, payment providers, search engines, and other websites block access, and links, to sites guilty of sharing or streaming copyrighted materials.
The biggest criticism of the SOPA act is that it allows law enforcement to block access to an entire internet domain due to infringing material posted on a single webpage, or blog, on that domain. This oversteps the mandate of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1996. The DMCA also criminalized the sharing or streaming of copyrighted intellectual property, but Title II of the act contained a “safe harbor” for internet service providers (ISP). Under Title II ISP’s are protected from liability if they adhere to set guidelines and promptly block access to allegedly infringing material (or remove such material from their systems) if they receive a notification claiming infringement from a copyright holder or the copyright holder's agent. SOPA overstepped this provision putting the impossible task of monitoring content of each domain on the ISPs.
While SOPA is currently considered dead, there is more legislation on the horizon. Senator Patrick Leahy introduced the PROTECT IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act, or PIPA). PIPA’s stated goal is to giving the US Government and copyright holders additional tools to limit intellectual property rights infringement and counterfeiting by foreign entities. Congress also has an alternative to SOPA, Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN Act) which also aims to limit copyright infringement while acknowledging that “We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet”. Due to the recent criticism of SOPA, both PIPA and the OPEN Act are on hold until there is better agreement on how to proceed.
The SOPA protest has emphasized the copyright infringement issue. On President Obama’s first virtual town meeting (aka Google+ hangout), he was asked several questions about this topic. When asked about this issue, Obama replied "I think that it's going to be possible for us to make sure that we're protecting intellectual property that creates a lot of jobs in this country. It's one of the United States' biggest exports, but also do it in a way that it doesn't affect the fundamental integrity of the internet as an open, transparent system."
These bills may be on hold but we will see them, or some form of them, again. Yes the trick will be how to enforce copy right laws and maintain the internet as an open system.
Do you want to learn more about SOPA, PIPA and OPEN? Visit keep the web#OPEN.
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