This post is the first part of a round-up of significant developments in 2012.
Piracy
"Well, yes mate. See, I’m dishonest. And a dishonest man you can always
trust to be dishonest. Honestly. It’s the honest ones you need to watch
out for, because you never know when they’re going to do something
incredibly… stupid." Captain Jack Sparrow (IMDb Link; captainjackblog.com Link)
In January, the Justice Department took down one of the largest file sharing services on the Internet, Megaupload, for alleged piracy of copyrighted material. The colorful cast of characters involved in Megaupload will guarantee a forthcoming movie to rival
Social Network. You can read more details, including endorsements of Megaupload by celebrities, its purported rapper CEO, and its founder Kim Dotcom and his $6 million worth of automobiles in these linked reports from
Marketplace Tech Report and
The New York Times.
Here is what I find interesting about this story:
- There seems to be little dispute that Megaupload was trafficking illegally in copyrighted material.
- Megaupload was wildly popular, being ranked in the top 20 of Internet sites.
- The Justice Department had to reach across the waters to take down Megaupload, which is based outside the United States, and to arrest some of the indicted principals. Kim Dotcom (a.k.a. Kim Schmitz) was living in New Zealand.
- The Justice Department’s action prompted a retaliatory protest from
Anonymous, a loosely organized group of Internet hackers (more on which can be found at this NYT link). In what the Times called "digital
Molotov cocktails," Anonymous appears to have launched digital denial of
service attacks on computers at the Justice Department and major
entertainment companies as protest over the shutdown of Megaupload.
- The scope of action taken by the Justice Department is significant. The Times reported:
As part of the crackdown, more than 20 search warrants were executed in the United States and in eight other countries. About $50 million in assets were also seized, as well as a number of servers and 18 domain names that formed Megaupload’s network of file-sharing sites.
Concurrent with the Megaupload take-down, Congressional consideration of legislation to stop Internet piracy came under attack from major Internet players. Two bills were before Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, in the House, and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, or PIPA, in the Senate. The day before the Megaupload take-down, major Internet sites such Wikipedia and Google launched campaigns in opposition to the legislation, arguing that it would result in serious impairment on the freedom to share information on the Internet. Wikipedia actually "went dark" for a day, taking down access to its site, one of the most widely used on the Internet, and posting instead a message to users who accessed the site asking them to oppose legislation and to contact their representatives in Congress to pass the message along.
The SOPA/PIPA protest is notable for several reasons. It marks an historic moment when Internet giants like Google and Wikipedia set aside commercial and competitive differences and acted in concert to express a political view. More importantly, they did so in a way that demonstrated again the considerable power that the Internet has to reach people, communicate ideas and organize political action.
These Internet companies are expressing valid issues about the provisions of SOPA/PIPA, particularly whether the measures to prevent piracy go too far and would impede legitimate exchanges of information. That does not mean, however, the the proposed legislation is wholly wrong or the that Internet companies, most of whom have commercial interests to protect as well as the freedom of information sharing, are completely right. New York Times columnist David Pogue has
a good commentary on this protest of SOPA/PIPA.
In that commentary Pogue points out that the opposition to SOPA/PIPA falls into two different groups that are not really in agreement with each other. The first group would agree the piracy of protected intellectual property should be stopped, but takes issue with the steps that SOPA/PIPA would take to stop such piracy. The concerns of this group could be addressed by re-writing the provisions of the legislation. The second group really believes that piracy is good, a kind of an Internet variant of Gordon Geko’s famous "Greed is good" statement from the movie Wall Street. This second group wants to be able to have free Internet access to copyrighted material, whatever its nature. The second group wants no legislation or enforcement efforts at all. In this respect, the people protesting the take-down of Megaupload, including
Anonymous, also may represent those who want free information without cost, even if it is protected by copyright or other intellectual property rights.
With these two developments occurring side-by-side, it is also most interesting to note that the existing laws that were used to take down Megaupload appear to have rather far-reaching enforcement powers already. If you believe that the artists and businesses who create music, film, literature, photograph and other forms of intellectual property should have their rights protected and that fair compensation should be paid for use of such material, then it would seem important to improve the existing laws that protect such rights in a way that does not threaten the free speech and the free exchange of ideas.
