Paper 1: SOPA/PIPA (sort of)
Due: Friday, Feb 24 2012.
Your paper must be submitted electronically,
either via email or through Blackboard.
Filesharing involving copyright infringement began as peer-to-peer
operations, sometimes with the involvement of a central server that
acts as a "search engine". Recently there has been a rise in
filesharing where the infringing content is actually stored on the central server, eg the now-defunct megaupload.com. Your paper is to address the conflict between the rights of content owners (eg to stop filesharing sites on a timely basis) versus the rights of ordinary users of the internet.
The conflict here is that efforts to eliminate sites that enable online
infringing may also eliminate legitimate internet activity.
In the fall of 2011 the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect
Intellectual Property Act) proposals were introduced into the US
Congress. One approach is to ask whether the SOPA and PIPA proposals to
go after file sharers go too far.
Are there parts of these proposals that are reasonable measures to be
taken against file sharers? In going after file sharers, how much
should "legitimate" internet sites be restrained? And, finally, is
Youtube (or sites like it) a legitimate business or a borderline pirate?
You can focus on SOPA and PIPA in particular, or you can write about
the broader process of tradeoffs between content protection and
ordinary usage. If you choose the latter approach, the Supreme Court
doctrine of "substantial non-infringing uses" (SNIUs) may be relevant;
is the SNIU test alone enough to allow a site to operate?.
Some of the claimed provisions of SOPA/PIPA include:
- logging the IP addresses assigned to residential users
- removing from the DNS system sites such as megadownload.net, thepiratebay.org, isohunt.com,
cinematorrents.com
- blocking all access to 85.17.30.101 (today's IP address of
megadownload.net, located in the Netherlands), even if legitimate sites share that IP address
- allowing the above blocking based on a court order
requested by
the content owner, without necessarily a hearing involving the site
owner, and certainly without holding such a hearing in a location
convenient to the site owner.
- allowing court orders to ban online advertisers and online
payment processors from some sites
- allowing court orders to ban google, etc from listing such sites
- banning any attempt to conceal your IP address, or to access
banned websites through proxies
- eliminating the ISP-safe-harbor provisions for user-posted
content, when the site is "primarily designed or operated for the
purpose of offering services in a manner that enables or facilitates
[copyright violation]" in the
opinion of the content holder.
- Even if the opinion of the content holder isn't the sole input,
the above clause may pose grave problems for any site that allows
user-posted content, such as Youtube and Wikipedia.
- criminalizing the existing DNS standard (which may automatically query other,
non-US, registrars for sites blocked in the US). Note that the U.S. does pretty
much control the top-level DNS servers, but that nothing
prevents users from pointing their DNS resolver at different, non-US,
"root servers", and in fact users may not even know such "unofficial" results are being included in searches.
The 1999 DMCA created the "safe harbor" provision under which an ISP or
hosting company could not be held liable for infringement in
user-contributed content as long as they responded promptly to
"takedown" notices. Some have argued that Youtube took advantage of
this provision, complying with the law but knowing full well that
content owners would have difficulty searching all the Youtube content
for every infringing example. Regardless of Youtube's intent, SOPA in
particular would appear to remove this safe-harbor protection.
Furthermore, the vagueness of SOPA when combined with the substantial
financial position of the entertainment industry may mean that fighting
accusations of facilitating infringement may be unaffordable for
smaller sites or startups, forcing such sites simply to agree not to
accept user-posted content.
Other proposals, apparently not in SOPA/PIPA, are to require ISPs to
reduce bandwidth for or block users who have been accused of
filesharing. Aternatively, ISPs might be required to do more inspection
of user content, or more logging of sites users have visited.
Many of these provisions may have significant impacts on legitimate
internet use. However, the world is full of tradeoffs, and many laws
have impacts on legitimate use. At what point do such restrictions on
internet use go too far? Are there other ways to approach the problem
of file sharing? How seriously should we impact the Internet in our
efforts to stamp out file-sharing? Do not lightly dismiss the need of
the entertainment industry to reduce piracy.
You may also consider the RIAA/MPAA lawsuits against individual file sharers: is there a fundamental legal issue here?
Your paper will be graded primarily on organization
(that is, how you lay out your sequence of paragraphs), focus (that is,
whether you stick to the topic), and the nature and completeness of
your arguments.
It is essential
that all material from other sources be enclosed in quotation marks (or
set off as a block quote), and preferably with a citation to the
original source as well.
Expected length: 3-5 pages (600+ words)