Copyrights and Internet Piracy: SOPA and PIPA

Essential Questions… What are SOPA and PIPA? Should people make money off of their creativity? How damaging is counterfeit or illegal media? How do we balance the rights of people to profit off of their intellectual property versus the right to free speech on the internet? What were the problems with SOPA and PIPA?

The Problem The playing of illegally copied music and movies is booming Most pirate sites are abroad, beyond the reach of United States law enforcement,

Economics of Piracy $58 billion is lost to the U.S. economy annually due to content theft More than 373,000 lost American jobs $16 billion in lost employees’ earnings Plus $3 billion in badly needed federal State and local governments’ tax revenue. MPAA

The people they’re trying to stop… 4 from Megaupload arrested Caused $500 million in copyright damage Made $175 million

LIES! Opponents say these numbers assume that every pirated copy would have been bought Think of used bookstores, libraries, amazon.com…

SOPA AND PIPA were proposed solutions… In 2011, the House and Senate took up separate bills, broadly supported on both sides of the political aisle, that aimed to cut off the oxygen for foreign pirate sites by taking aim at American search engines like Google and Yahoo, payment processors like PayPal and ad servers that allow the pirates to function. The House titled its bill the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. The Senate called its theProtect Intellectual Property Act, or PIPA.YahooStop Online Piracy ActProtect Intellectual Property Act

How does SOPA and PIPA work? Filtering or blocking through the Domain Name System — the Internet’s address book — could drive users to unreliable routes through and around the blocked sites, the White House said. That would “pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online.”

How does SOPA and PIPA work? The terminology for the online world are broad Internet companies feared that because the definitions of terms like “search engine” are so broad in the legislation, Web sites big and small could be responsible for monitoring all material on their pages for potential violations — an expensive and complex challenge.

Objections to SOPA and PIPA Twitter, Google and YouTube – legislation would enable Internet regulation and censorship on par with the government regulation in China and Iran. – the bills would stifle online innovation, violate the First Amendment – The two bills would force them to be online police and hold them responsible if users of their sites link to pirated content.

The Obama White House: “We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.” Aneesh Chopra, U.S. Chief Technology Officer

Protests In November, Tumblr rigged a tool that “censored” the page its users see when they log into the site, explained the legislation and routed them to contact information for their representatives in Congress. The stunt resulted in 80,000 calls to legislators in a three-day period.rigged a tool

The next day…

Essential Questions… How damaging is counterfeit or illegal media? How do we balance the rights of people to profit off of their intellectual property versus the right to free speech on the internet? What were the problems with SOPA and PIPA?