Today, in the age of the Internet, privacy and security are increasingly crucial concerns for citizens, legislators, and corporations.
To understand the intertwined nature of contemporary technology, politics, and business and to see just how ubiquitous this relationship has become in society, it is useful to examine the issue of copyright violation, specifically online piracy.
This problem, as well as the search for viable solutions pertaining to it, is not only an intriguing concept in and of itself, but also a synecdoche for the many obstacles we face entering the 21st century.
So far, several solutions have been proposed in the United States Congress aimed at stopping online piracy.
Among these are the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) and Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA).
In January of 2012, SOPA and PIPA were shelved indefinitely by the Senate due to concerns regarding privacy. This postponement occurred following widespread protest from several major websites, including Google, Reddit and Wikipedia.
Both major political parties were concerned that SOPA and PIPA did not find a “balance between protecting Americans’ intellectual property, and maintaining openness and innovation on the Internet” (Williams).
If passed through the Senate, these bills would allow the government to obtain any information they desire if it relates to stopping a case of copyright infringement.
This would include unlimited access to personal data such as emails, passwords, credit card numbers, and much more (Williams).
While the government looking through personal content during a criminal case is not a new concept, it has always taken place with a search warrant.
One way to solve the issues presented with SOPA and PIPA when revising them would be to require the police or government to have a valid search warrant issued by a judge, as is the case in our present legal system, or to have probable cause, within the circumstances already defined by the constitution.
If the bills were slightly amended to include a clause such as this, it is very likely that public opinion of SOPA and PIPA would change entirely and open up an opportunity for these acts to become laws.
Similar to the SOPA and PIPA bills, the recent CISPA has proposed further solutions to the problem of online piracy.
Although it was defeated in the Senate in 2012, it has recently been proposed again and is moving through Congress.
The notorious hacking group Anonymous has begun to protest the bill, but unlike the SOPA and PIPA protests of last year, this protest has not received any support from major corporations.
This is because CISPA’s main goals are to protect companies from blame if the government forces them to give up their customers’ personal information, and to require the government, not the corporation, to anonymize said content, lessening the load on these companies.
Although laws such as the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the Copyright Act of 1976 are already in place to protect against piracy, there is one simple change that would help immensely.
Currently, it is not illegal to stream unofficially redistributed and copyrighted films or music online if it is for personal or non-profit use.
Personal viewing of films online is one of the largest areas contributing to copyright infringement as well as its eventual negative effects.
Firstly, it provides one of the largest areas of motivation for pirates to post movies on the Internet; many of these services cost money, and almost all of them have advertisements, providing revenue for the pirates.
Often, pirated streaming websites provide movies before DVD releases or even before their theater release, and thus consumers turn to these sites, causing billions of dollars in loss to the entertainment industry.
If the simple process of streaming pirated media online were made illegal and people were discouraged from doing so, huge strides would be made in undoing the negative effects of copyright infringement.
To date, after countless proposals to solve copyright infringement, none have succeeded. SOPA, PIPA, and CISPA have all been defeated in Congress and minimal progress has been made, resulting in the continuing loss of money and jobs.
While inappropriate use of copyrighted content may be harmful to large corporations’ financial interests, the flip-side is that many creative individuals actually benefit from having access to copyrighted material in films, songs, and other multimedia formats to create new and original content.
Thus, when looking for solutions to fight copyright infringement, we must find a solution that not only combats piracy effectively while maintaining individual privacy, but also encourages new content creation, by expanding the definition of fair use without the imposition of too many unnecessary restrictions.
While it is a difficult problem, there is hope that if we make the viewing of unofficially redistributed media illegal, and at the same time ease restrictions on copyrighted content for young, independent filmmakers, musicians, and artists, we can accomplish two major goals: ameliorating much of the financial losses of large corporations, and, even more importantly, giving the next generation of content creators the freedom they need to realize their dreams in various artistic mediums for years to come.