Online Piracy Debate Continues to Divide Washington
WASHINGTON – One year after Congress sought major legislation to put an end to online piracy, lingering concerns over privacy and Internet freedom promise to start anew the discussion on intellectual property rights in Washington – an issue that will likely make the technology and content industries clash again.
In light of the recent death of renowned Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz, many supporters of Internet freedom took to the web on Jan. 18 to celebrate Free Internet Day and commemorate the important role he played in the defeat of anti-piracy legislation last year. At the time of his death, Swartz faced charges for allegedly hacking into the database of a digital library and threatening to make millions of academic articles free to the public.
Like many, Swartz worried about how the Internet is used and who controls the information that flows on it. This led him and a diverse group composed of civil liberties groups, Internet activists, and technology companies to stand against two major anti-piracy bills considered by Congress last year.
The House of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), introduced by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), intended to end online piracy by blocking websites accused of copyright infringement. The bill was shot down last year over concerns that its reach was too broad, resulting in a crackdown on legitimate sites.
SOPA would have given content producers the power to force Internet service providers, search engines, or payment services to shut down access to a website that the content owner believed violated its copyrights.
The second anti-piracy bill, the U.S. Senate’s PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), also focused on curbing access “to websites dedicated to the sale of infringing or counterfeiting goods,” particularly those registered outside of the U.S.
The bills would have imposed restrictions on U.S. companies forcing them to stop selling online ads to suspected pirate sites, processing payment for illegal online sales, and listing websites suspected of piracy in search engine results.
Opponents argued the bills would have foisted considerable regulatory costs on technology firms and stifled the freedom to innovate, without reducing the availability of pirated content online. In addition, free speech advocates worried that the legislation may have provided new tools to the government to silence online speech.
Last January, the Internet sent a loud message to Congress in what was the largest online protest in history. Thousands of websites participated in the coordinated blackout, some of them posting links so people could urge Congress to stop the bill. On Jan. 18, 2012, several prominent websites, such as Wikipedia and Reddit, entirely cut off access to their users. Other sites, like Google and Flickr, featured protests against the laws on their homepages.
The response was so overwhelming that House Judiciary Committee chairman Smith and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) shelved both bills in the Senate and the House shortly after the blackout.
But despite last year’s setback, the content industry did not cease its pursuit of intellectual property and copyright legislation to curb online piracy, and it has now focused its sights on other ways to bring about such laws, both domestically and overseas.
The U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a multilateral trade agreement that includes rules on intellectual property and its enforcement. The free trade agreement – currently being discussed by eleven nations including the U.S. – has received widespread criticism for its lack of transparency.
The official draft of the agreement has not been released to the public, but last year Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) took the unprecedented step of leaking a secret U.S. trade document – though various sources had already made the text available to the public. Issa published the entire chapter of the TPP dealing with intellectual property in an effort to push the Obama administration into disclosing more details of the trade agreement.
“Congress has a constitutional duty to oversee trade negotiations and not simply act as a rubber stamp to deals about which they were kept in the dark. While I had hoped the TPP would permit me to observe this round of the negotiation process firsthand, our efforts to open TPP negotiations up to transparency will continue,” said Issa in a letter sent to U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, shortly after leaking the text.
According to the leaked portion of the document, the U.S. is pushing for the adoption of copyright measures far more restrictive than currently required by other international treaties in the past and that could require changes in current U.S. law. Reviews show that the proposal increases proprietor rights significantly, without an equal expansion of limitations and exceptions to such rights needed to serve the public.
As it is standard procedure for multilateral trade agreements, trade representatives of the participating nations conduct negotiations behind closed doors. A select group of transnational corporations, however, has access to the texts and talks of the negotiations as consultants. Large pharmaceutical manufacturers and the Hollywood entertainment industry dominate this advisory group.
U.S. government hankers for hackers Tue Aug 2, 2011
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/02/idUSN1E7701KK20110802
Internet security anybody?
Published on Aug 23, 2012
William Binney is among a group of N.S.A. whistle-blowers, including Thomas A. Drake, who have each risked everything — their freedom, livelihoods and personal relationships — to warn Americans about the dangers of N.S.A. domestic spying; A top-secret program he says is broadly collecting Americans’ personal data.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OemwW60VxDY&feature=plcp
FOURTH AMENDMENT:
The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Ultimately, these words endeavor to protect two fundamental liberty interests – the right to privacy and freedom from arbitrary invasions.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fourth_amendment
Anybody voting against the Constitution, and Bill of Rights, will be removed and prosecuted for treason!
The internet remains essentially the wild west frontier with very few laws regulating it. Hacking seems to be the ONLY ‘crime’ for which is heavily regulated under developing cybercrime statues. Other than that, the U.S. Constitution, seemingly has little to no warranty applications on the internet. On the other hand, I suspect that the government enjoys a double edge reward for virtually no regulations. It can provide a framework for ‘free and open access’ of criminal intelligence monitoring and gathering on many types of public access sites such as political ‘activist’ sites, how-to sites, sex sites and on down the line, which just may not be such a bad thing.
Anti-piracy efforts on the internet for copyright infringment seems to be divided up among few special interest groups that will fight for special protections as long as theere is stars in the sky.
It would be interesting to hear someone attempt to justify why new “anti-piracy legislation” is needed. Piracy is already illegal. Copyright infringement is already illegal. Neither will become “more illegal”—or less likely—merely because another unnecessary omnibus law is passed.
Most of the entities agitating over the alleged need for additional copyright legislation either want to hand more power to the federal government so as to avoid the expense of defending their property themselves, or want to contain their own exposure to liability when they use the work of others without permission—or some combination of the two.
And, by the way—while Aaron Swartz’s suicide, like all suicides, was tragic, he was not an “Internet freedom activist”; he was a thief, who intentionally, in the service of an ideology that said “your property is mine, just because I want it,” went out and took what did not belong to him.
The Aaron Swartz case is a bit more complicated than simple theft. He had access to JSTOR for free (as a MIT fellow) but later violated the terms of service by downloading more than the limited access. That was the crime that the US Attorney decided to charge as violation of the CFAA.
JSTOR is a service that provides digitized articles of scientific and research journals. From some minor investigations, it appears that JSTOR doesn’t “own” the copyright to the articles either, but is only the publication service (http://about.jstor.org/publishers-faq#What_is_Copyright_Clearance_Center_CCC). In the age where information and ideas are the new “products” and you can copy something rather than steal it, a lot of IP law needs to evolve.
“In the age where information and ideas are the new “products” and you can copy something rather than steal it, a lot of IP law needs to evolve.”
Perhaps you would be good enough to explain what you mean by this.
In the meantime, were Swartz merely grabbing material for his own use in some arguable violation of the terms of service, that would have been a minor matter. He wasn’t. He was behaving like a PETA vandal letting laboratory animals loose. He was grabbing material so that he could “make it freely available” to people who would otherwise have to obtain permission to get it and pay a licensing fee.
I would be very curious to learn under what theory you are willing to justify this arrogant little prick deciding that he had the right to make free with other people’s works in this manner.
Confusing two things.
Was he justified? No, never said he was, but the “theft” came from the publishers, not JSTOR. He wasn’t busted for theft, or infringement but Federal computer crime. He would be open to civil suits brought on by the original publishers if they still had a valid copyright in place. Sorry for the confusion.
As for IP laws (copyright and patent) – yes they do need to change to reflect reality. No, I don’t believe creators should be ok with people illegally copying their work, but also the life of copyright has been extended way longer than initially founded beyond the creator’s life. It can be argued that it is now reducing creativity and the production for new work. Plus, there are sticky questions about newly emerging tech: what about 3D printing? Is the file or the item produced that is protected (or the infringement)? What about journal articles produced from publicly funded work or data? Various social media companies are claiming copyrights to data their users create – they provide the medium, but what rights to the original user’s have (if any)? A lot of this stuff hasn’t been tested.
You will have to explain what you mean by “the theft came from the publishers. If Swartz was stealing other people’s work (which he was), with the intent of then making that work freely available to an unlimited number of others (which he was), he was trampling wholesale—or attempting to trample wholesale—on the copyrights of the authors of the works he was taking. They had placed their works in the hands of the publishers, and thence to JSTOR. One may quarrel, perhaps, with the way that the prosecution of Swartz was handled, but what it boils down to is that he did not respect the property rights of others. One wonders whether he felt so free and easy about ownership where his own property was concerned; it is doubtful, though ultimately unimportant. He was taking things he did not have the right to take, in service of an ideology that stated “what is yours is mine.”
Not only “can this be argued”—it is argued, endlessly, by the anti-copyright “copyright” bar. It is a completely invalid argument.
Works in copyright are not unavailable, though the anti-copyright bar continues to falsely argue that they are; they merely require permission to be used. That permission sometimes—though not always—requires payment. It is the need for payment that those whining about the length of the copyright term are objecting to.
As to the argument about “reducing creativity,” that is the most risible of all. The anti-copyright agitators love to use this line, but it is merely a slightly more sophisticated take on the “I don’t wanna pay” argument. If the work which someone wishes to use has achieved “iconic” status, then it has value—and it is wholly appropriate that someone seeking to use it or riff off it for the creation of a derivative work should pay handsomely for the privilege of doing so. If it is not so “iconic,” then the price will be less. And if the person seeking use does not want to pay, then he or she will have to—guess what!—exercise creativity to work around their own tight-fistedness.
There is a widespread belief among the anti-copyright agitators that once the Little Red Creative Hen has produced the bread, all of the animals in the barnyard have a “right” to snack off the bread for which they have not toiled. Nope; sorry. The copyright law “promotes the progress of science and the useful arts” in two ways—by providing a financial incentive to creators by granting them protection for their works for a limited time, and by forcing the tightwads to be creative if they don’t want to pay the freight for usage.
“Public funding” is a red herring. Ideas are not copyrightable—only the expression of ideas once fixed in tangible form. It matters not that “public money” may have contributed to the support of those who fix ideas in tangible form; it is the creators who own the work, subject to the existing provisions of work made for hire restrictions. As to the claims by “social media” companies, most of these are risible. Such companies usually claim a limited copyright in the work; they must, simply because they are reproducing and distributing it. But copyright is divisible—and such claims are analagous to those of a licensee such as a magazine claiming a nonexclusive righ in a creator’s work for publishing it in a particular issue.
The above is in reply to bianchi roadie’s post which begins “Confusing two things” in #4 above.
A compromise may be to end copyright at the death of the creator. If they sold those rights while alive, any concern buying them would know of such a law in advance and negotiate accordingly.
As for trademark, it doesn’t seem right that people who were distant relatives of Bettie Page or companies who never even knew her should realize millions Miss Page herself never saw. The very people who created the Bettie Page resurgence have been shunted to the roadside.
It is unclear why you think ending copyright at the death of the creator is a solution to anything. All it does is disadvantage the creator and his or her heirs without addressing the problem of theft.
How can you disadvantage someone who’s dead?
You can disadvantage someone whose ability to license their work decreases as they get older or their health deteriorates by ensuring that any license they enter into will be of less value.
If a copyright automatically terminates at the author’s death—a date which, by its nature, is uncertain—then the author cannot grant rights to a licensee for a lengthy period of time with any certainty, for the license will be cut short in the event of their demise.
I had to look up Bettie Page. Apparently, she was a pin-up girl of the ’50s.
I do not know what Ms. Page’s story was, but it is unlikely that her images raise issues of either copyright or trademark. It is customary for models to sign releases when posing; the photographer, or the company the photographer worked for, would in all likelihood have held the copyright to her images. It is possible that there is a right of publicity issue with regards to her images, but again, if she signed a standard release at the time she was working as a model, that is unlikely.
Whether people like to admit it or not, just the threat of this action a year ago put a huge damper on illegal content such as music, books and movies.
Sites that had a few hundred pages of movies from the last 50 years suddenly had their links to download those movies go dead, even sites in Arabic – but they never stopped uploading new stuff – they just altered the way you got there. They were scared, but started over again, even as they never really stopped entirely.
Similarly, sites that offered literature and music severely curtailed what they offered. Such sites are still wary; they are slowly offering more and more content but trying to not attract too much attention. Other sites, located in Europe and in a default foreign language, never really slowed down. For an SF, fantasy fan, the entirety of the last 100 years is at your fingertips, free, including the latest release.
The biggest offering of free music, youtube, apparently does so with the consent of the artists. Perhaps they’ve resigned themselves to a trade off between promotion, reality, and income from live performances and people who buy on the honor system or are simply tech incompetent. Some smarter bands have turned this into an advantage by using political correctness to act as if they’re down with freedom, and then hitting their fans with expensive boxed sets with bells and whistles not available in a simple file.
The overall reality is that, for example, George R.R. Martin’s long-awaited “A Dance With Dragons,” available the first day on iTunes for $50, was also available for free as a clean PDF on the net within hours.
We’re talking about people, understandably, pushing back to preserve horse and buggies because their income stream is threatened. If there are sites that have 5,000 science-fiction and fantasy novels and 5,000 great songs, and there is free shareware to change those files from avi or mobi to txt and mp3, people are going to do it.
The simple act of releasing digital art to the public compromises it. Tech will always stay ahead of attempts to constrain those files, either because they are pirates or believe in free stuff.
The only hope is to attack websites. Put a bureaucracy in place to monitor and threaten those sites, and it’ll stem the flow, at least for the more casual users. But hidey holes become famous, simply because they can’t be touched. Water will find its own course, and all will be as before. It’s no coincidence that pirate rmbv movies often have Arabic, Chinese and Russian sub-titles. They’re hard to touch. Sites like Amazon are even showing indications they may pirate their own content, by selling “used” ebooks. Amazon has tried to maintain control and a mini-monopoly by using a Kindle they can reach into at will.
If you know how to do it, look at a map of where some of these sites operate from, underpopulated regions in the barrens of eastern Russia. It’s employment, and necessity, and an internet connection, are the mothers of invention.
Theft of copyrighted material is a worldwide problem, but worldwide problems are beyond the reach of national law no matter how comprehensively written.
Aaron Swartz is not a sympathetic character, nor should the actions of which he is accused be condoned or considered good. What he did was the equivalent of making massive numbers of photocopies of the affected journals and giving them away. I don’t especially like the practice many of said journals have of charging fairly steep rates for one paper if you don’t have access to a university database, but that is their choice and they have to pay the bills somehow. It was not Swartz’s choice for him to make to short-circuit that.
I have been in the position of seeing work I produced myself (before the Internet), containing a copyright notice, copied and reproduced elsewhere with my name excised, i.e., passed off as somebody else’s work. It pissed me off. If the persons who wanted to reproduce the material had simply contacted me, I would have gladly given permission for reproduction with proper credit gratis. So I’ve had a small taste of piracy of intellectual property. It sucks.
This has dissuaded me from pursuing certain writing projects, including badly needed technical reference material on certain automotive topics, because it’s obvious that should I self-publish something, some sanctimonious anti-copyright prick such as Swartz is likely to scan the pages and post them online as a PDF. If I do the work, I should be able to recoup my expenses in some fashion and even make the dreaded profit, not see some self-appointed hacker/Marxist make free copies available to everyone else.
IT law needs tweaking in some ways to benefit those who genuinely subscribe to the concept of fair use and aren’t interested in making bootleg copies to give away. In fairness, we must also look at whether existing copyright terms are in fact too long, as back in the 19th Century US copyrights were limited to 28 years. “Author’s lifetime + 70 years” does seem a bit rich. But once someone has created intellectual property, s/he should have sole rights to distribute and sell it as desired—not someone such as Swartz.
The copyright term under the 1909 law (which was supplanted by the current law in 1978) was for 28 years, renewable for another 28, for a total not of 28, but of 56 years.
The current copyright term came into being for a number of reasons. The renewal term—to which the anti-copyright bar has been agitating a return—was, and is, responsible for much confusion over whether a copyright of an age to be in its second term was still valid, or had lapsed due to failure of renewal. The relative brevity of the 58-year term meant that a creator blessed with long life, such as Irving Berlin, would actually outlive his early copyrights. And, too, the life-plus-fifty and life-plus-seventy terms are the norm among many nations with which the US has reciprocal copyright treaties; it was felt to be inappropriate for the US to grant foreign authors a lengthier term of protection than was granted to domestic authors. Parenthetically, it is interesting that so many of our domestic Leftists, who seem bent on aping Europe in all things socialist from government healthcare to impenetrable bureaucracy, are dedicated to making an exception when it comes to copyright—doubtless because it is, in the end, a personal property right.
Agreed with your analysis, especially the astute comment about the reason leftists don’t support copyright. But before the 1909 law the US limit was 28 years period. Mark Twain (justifiably) complained about this in one of his essays.
Over the last several years the left has concocted justifications for piracy of IP such as “information wants to be free” (= free of charge) and “we all learned to share in school” (but what lefties want to share with others isn’t theirs to share). Unfortunately, the response to some relatively innocuous transgressions has been heavy-handed, such as high-dollar lawsuits over file-sharing—but considering the wholesale piracy of protected IP online, this was inevitable.
From 1831 on, the initial term of US copyright was 28 years, renewable for an additional 14—making 42 years total. This was a lengthy term in light of the life expectancy at the time. The renewal term was extended—doubled—in 1909, to 28 years. Twain, being long-lived, may have experienced outliving his early copyrights as Irving Berlin later did, or he may have missed a renewal deadline, or both. Doing away with the bother of renewals is one of the major advances of the current law—and one which the anti-copyright bar, which seeks to create as much confusion as it can about copyright ownership to justify and facilitate throwing as much as possible into the public domain, would most like to undo.
The “heavy-handedness” of “high-dollar lawsuits over file-sharing” were a necessary, albeit inadequate, exercise. It was the only way to inform people that they were breaking the law in a way they might actually notice.
Back around fifteen or twenty years ago, when the Internet was in its relative infancy, people used to refer to it as “the information highway.” This now-quaint term offers a useful analogy. Back about a hundred or a hundred and twenty years ago there was a new thing called the automobile. If you wanted one of these machines, all you had to do was buy it; there were no driver’s licenses, no license plates. There was no auto insurance, there were no speed limits, there were no traffic signs and certainly no stoplights. Eventually, enough children and dogs died for these things to be enacted, and now we have licenses, license plates, traffic signs, rules of the road, etc.
When the “information superhighway” came into being, we had rules of the road already in place regarding the use of other people’s copyrights. But people can walk into a computer store today, as they could walk into an auto showroom 100 years ago, buy an infringement machine, and go tooling down the information superhighway in complete disregard of the rules of the road. The RIAA file-sharing lawsuits did not stop infringement any more than giving out speeding tickets will stop all speeding—but they did make some people pay for breaking the rules, and they caused some people to abide by them.
Well done…again. Interesting, clear and precise. Thank you for the article Rodrigo.
http://www.sharinggalaxy.com/sg230.html
This is the most highly piracy website which is running on internet in hidden form.
the internet service provider is doing piracy here.in Bangalore (india) the internet service provider ”G-Broadband)” is running this website, they have hide theire piracy content from others by making a own server & hoster in their office, only the customers who is using this internet (G-Broadband) can go inside the folders & download anything at 9MBPS transfer rate. there are folders alphabitaclly arranged for fast file search. you better see when u are using this internet here.