To combat Internet theft of copyrighted materials, Congress is taking action with its new Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
Many people do not think that pirating movies and music from the Internet creates a significant loss for these producers industry-wide. According to NPD, a group that gathers business statistics, in 2009 only 37 percent of music in the United States was purchased legally. Creative America, a group fighting online piracy of movies, reports that more than 500,000 movies and television shows are viewed illegally every day. In addition, stats from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation show 24 percent of the world’s bandwidth is devoted to digital theft of movies, music and other copyrighted material. These numbers equate to tens of billions of dollars lost annually and more than 10,000 U.S. jobs lost every year.
“The bill is of vital importance to protecting American jobs and artisans, protecting American consumers from dangerous counterfeits, and ensuring the very vitality of American culture,” House Judiciary Committee member John Coyers, Jr. (D-Mich.) said during a hearing on the act in front of the rest of the house on Nov. 16.The SOPA and its Senate counterpart, Protection of Independent Property Act (PIPA), are meant to stop piracy by giving law enforcement and copyright holders greater ability to shut down sites that illegally share media. SOPA does this by making it so that websites, if found guilty of illegally distributing copyright content, can have their domain names blocked, advertisers removed and the website would be banned from search-engine results.
Others say SOPA may have the opposite effect and hurt technology and other industries that depend on the Internet. Several technology companies are gathering against SOPA, claiming it goes beyond the law and into censorship because of the bill’s lack of a clear definition of what is and is not criminal content.
“The bills as drafted would expose law-abiding U.S. Internet and technology companies to new and uncertain liabilities,” AOL, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo!, Zynga, LinkedIn, Facebook, Ebay and Google said in a joint letter to Congress.
Private groups like Censorship America are gathering against SOPA and PIPA. When SOPA had a hearing on Nov. 16, Censorship America organized a day of protest with 6,000 websites. Participants put up a blocked homepage.
To avoid the present and future consequences of digital theft, WTAMU Network Administrator Greg Crowley recommends students to seek legal options through websites like Hulu and Spotify.
“There is no reason to view media content illegally when there are so many legal options,” Crowley said.
For more information on current copyright laws and legal sites to see copyrighted content, Security Analyst Lane Greene said students can go to IT’s page on Sharing and Downloading.
