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:
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)