02/27/12 SOPA, PIPA, and you. Theft is a crime.

It's commonly agreed that taking something that isn't yours is a crime and should be punished. In medieval society you could be branded or permanently disfigured to mark you with your crime as a constant burden and reminder. More modern methods of imprisonment have replaced the older practices, but the crime of stealing hasn't lost any of its significance. As time has gone on, new avenues of theft have opened up. Intellectual property and intangible data stored as zeroes and ones have become a prime target for all manner of thieves.

The act of illegally copying software or media files and using or distributing them is considered an act of piracy, a catch-all term for thefts of non-material products. Some have attempted to justify their actions as part of a struggle against the movie and music industries. Many creators have praised pirates for sharing their work and exposing them to a much wider audience. However, none of the benefits negate the fact that it is an act of theft. Piracy has positive outcomes, but is on the whole a criminal act.

There have been many attempts to define piracy over the years. What began as a term for robbery on the high seas came to mean different things to different people, though the modern interpretation likely stems from The Pirate Bay, a website dealing mostly in the sharing of data, frequently of questionable legality. For some piracy refers only to digital media theft, while others apply it as digital content in general. Still others recall the days of cassette culture and floppy disk copying with fondness or ire and consider piracy to be not just an act of theft, but an entire movement.

In the same way that we no longer brand thieves, in the modern age there are right and wrong ways to punish criminals for their actions, and right and wrong laws to serve as guidelines for those

02/27/12 punishments. At time of writing there are two bills that have been introduced in Congress; SOPA, which stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act, and PIPA, which is short for Protect IP, which in and of itself is short for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property. Their purpose, as the proponents of the bills state, is to create a means of policing and punishing online piracy, but the means through which they will attempt to do so fall into the category of wrong ways to go about punishing theft. The SOPA and PIPA bills will do more harm than good because they will be ineffective at the job they were designed to do and are too far reaching in their powers due to power wording.

To understand modern piracy, and the problems with SOPA and PIPA, you have to begin with its roots. Bootlegging, or the illegal copying of music or video for sale, started in the 1960's with The Great White Wonder, a tape of Bob Dylan music containing many unreleased songs. A pair of enterprising vinyl manufacturers decided to create copies of the tape in the form of records to sell. The market for the unreleased songs was massive, and the popularity of the albums spurred others to follow suit. Jimi Hendrix live at the Royal Albert Hall was among the first live shows to be bootlegged, and sparked the beginning of bootlegging in the United Kingdom.

Policing this kind of copying became a major concern for the music industry, Millions of dollars in sales were lost every year as the sale and distribution of illegally recorded media formed an underground culture even more widespread than the rumrunning of the Prohibition period. The response was simple enough, to render bootlegging illegal, but the process of policing it was incredibly difficult in many instances, and the subculture flourished until the next big innovation came along in the late 1970s: cassette tapes.

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Modern piracy really began with the advent of the rewritable cassette tape. The cheap, rewritable cartridges became a mainstay of entertainment and cassette swapping became common practice with the rise of mix tapes, a term used to describe a collection of songs arranged to suit a mood, message or theme beyond the original meaning the artist intended on. The convenience of the medium also meant that it was perfectly suited to bootlegging music. The bootleg subculture became a movement led by people seeking to share their most beloved songs with friends and family or pass along the latest unreleased hit to other faithful fans of their favorite bands.

The response by the media industries was, in a way, expected. They turned to the government and pushed for a bill to ban the illegal copying of media. The government then turned around and said, in a more refined legal vocabulary than this, that making high quality copies in bulk, for sale, was illegal and a punishable offense, but that the creation of mix tapes and the like was not a big deal and didn't do any harm to the music and movie industries. To say that the entertainment industry was unimpressed would be an understatement, and a laughable one at that. To say that they were prepared to take matters into their own hands, however, would be perfectly accurate.

Media companies began to push hard for laws to prevent copying at the base level. Jack Valenti, head lobbyist for the MPAA, once compared the cassette recorder to Jack the Ripper and helpless Hollywood to a woman home alone, and his views were echoed by many outraged executives at almost every media company. Their voices, along with the right choice of alarmist phrasing, allowed them to clear the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in 1998. The DMCA was designed to make it legal to sell you data that could not be copied, and that could block the copying functions of the device you used that data

02/27/12 on, as well as prevent you from restoring the copying function as part of the agreement to sell you the data to begin with. It is at this point in the story that the internet enters, and the problems that led to SOPA and PIPA being formulated began to take shape.

The internet, as a means of sharing information with others, is impeccable. It is fast, robust and connected to the majority of home computers, granting access to its wealth of information to anyone with the ability to use a desktop. It is no small wonder, then, that this ease of access and data transfer made it a wonderful tool for the media sharing underground. The sharing of music files online rose in popularity as bootlegging slowly dwindled. Napster, launched in 1999, was the first attempt to create a centralized means of distributing music, and became immensely popular during its short lifespan. Within a year court cases had been filed and in March of 2001 the network was closed down. Then, in April of 2001 the BitTorrent protocol was released, and the die was cast.

The Torrent protocol alters the way in which a file is downloaded. Normally a file can only be downloaded from one source, but as a torrent it gets divided into smaller chunks of data that can be downloaded from multiple sources, meaning that the transfer of data is limited only by the receiver and not the distributor. Once the file has been downloaded, even if only in part the receiver can join their peers in distributing the chunks of data to others. In addition, a tracker can trace the progress of a torrent file and a collection of trackers in one place would allow a user to simply browse and download the torrents they wanted. As the BitTorrent protocol rose in popularity, so did the illegal uses of the technology.

Websites began to spring up hosting trackers for innumerable torrent files. Because the

02/27/12 technology, in and of itself, is only a means of transfer and cannot be stated as being illegal in and of itself no lawsuit could be filed against users of torrents without proof of illegal content being transferred. Instead the targets for lawsuits became the websites hosting the trackers. The Pirate Bay, for example, was fined over $4,000,000 in a single suit after being found guilty of assisting copyright violation. Such actions, however, have not deterred pirates online, and seem only to have angered them. Modern pirates continue to torrent, leech and seed data, passing their media back and forth both for the sake of their love of the works and as a statement against what they see as an oppressive media entity that doesn't deserve a penny from them.

Piracy is a single action with many consequences, some good and some bad. A personal colleague of mine, Daniel Haigh, is an aspiring novelist and writer of fiction on the internet. He spends his days working at a job that he dislikes and attending college, and at night he writes stories that he posts to the web while he practices his craft in the hopes of becoming good enough to be published. As a creator himself, when asked how he felt about piracy, he responded with having mixed feelings about it.

Piracy can be a good thing sometimes. I only know half the bands I life because someone sent me a song by them or I found it uploaded on youtube. Those bands would never have gotten a penny from me if I hadn't been exposed to their music without having to pay for it. As a means of distribution and exposure it can be a great help. But it can also be a terrible crime. Downloading entire albums, whole movies or books isn't just sampling their work. You might as well be taking the disk off the shelf in your local music shop. Some of my own work has been pirated before. A series of short stories I was working on got compiled without my permission and distributed. It was uploaded for free, but I wasn't credited in any way. The exposure was good for me, but only after I managed to prove that the content was mine.

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When asked about his own pirating habits, Dan reiterated his sampling stance, stating that he only pirate(s) material that (he) intend(s) to buy. Being a broke college student is hard, but it's not right for me to just take without permission, especially as someone hoping to make money from doing something creative. I pirate what I want and pay for it the moment I have the money to do so. People deserve the money they're due for what they make. I'm not going to stop browsing youtube for new songs to add to my playlist, but I only download when I'm certain that I'm prepared to pay for the tracks once I get my next paycheck.

Many other creators and teams like Rovio, creators of Angry Birds, don't mind piracy at all and support it to a certain degree, saying that it can get (them) more business at the end of the day. Still other creators release their content for free and sell merchandise related to their content to make money from the concept. It is through this model that many web-based comics conduct their business, hoping to impress readers enough to warrant the purchase of a t-shirt or plush toy of a favorite character. However, they fall into the minority. Even while the big companies make most, if not all, of the profit from CD sales and the like, creators by and large are still hesitant to permit the piracy of their wares.

SOPA and PIPA represent a change in how the music and movie industries want to approach the issue of piracy. From the standpoint of theory, they would work. They would shut down websites that permit the hosting of illegally copied content and allow the rest to remain so long as they removed that content. In practice, however, they would result in many hosting sites simply shutting down. For a website with a million users, even if it costs pennies to check their content, the cost would be too high for the site to remain open. There is also the not-so-insignificant fact that the means of policing the websites

02/27/12 wouldn't work.

The way that SOPA and PIPA propose to deal with websites that violate copyright laws is that they want to remove those sites from the domain name system. For the uninitiated, the domain name system is what converts human-friendly website names like google.com into the IP address that a computer can use. However, it is still possible to simply enter the IP address and get to that site without the domain name. The penalty would be thwarted, at least for the users trying to get to the site, by anyone clever enough to write down a string of numbers on a piece of paper.

In short, the methods of policing piracy that SOPA and PIPA propose to use to control the problem would do nothing to address the actual concerns of the proponents of the bill. They would simply make it very difficult for some websites to function, and for others to remain open at all. These bills would cripple modern internet culture and, in turn, a large portion of modern culture in general.

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Works Cited http://youthandmedia.org/wiki/History_and_Overview_of_Piracy http://www.philipman.net/clay-shirky-ted-talk-why-sopa-is-bad-for-you-transcript-included http://www.moremusic.co.uk/links/features/bootleg.htm http://mozy.com/infographics/a-history-of-bittorrent/ http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml http://androidcommunity.com/rovio-creator-of-angry-birds-say-piracy-can-be-a-good-thing-20120131/