Internet Piracy Law

Published on Tuesday, 22 November 2011 10:34

	By Richie Lesbirel Follow @_AsktheExperts_

Since the realisation of the Internet’s potential for file sharing, there have been people looking to exploit it, as there are with virtually any industry and service.

The Internet pirate, however, is much more difficult to catch than a ticket tout or the man selling knock-off “Golvin Kloin” jeans at your local market. For one, he or she has no physical goods to sell, only 1s and 0s. Secondly, there are millions of them.

Cast your minds back to the year 2000, when the problem of Internet piracy first came to the limelight. Thrash metal band Metallica came to legal blows against Napster for allowing its users to distribute their music without their (i.e. the copyright holder’s) consent, a lawsuit that culminated in not only the banning of nearly 600,000 of Napster’s users, but the bankrupting and liquidation of Napster themselves. This was the first time the issues surrounding file sharing software and peer-to-peer downloading were brought to the public’s attention. It was also the turning point for many pirates-to-be who, rather than taking it as a lesson on being a law-abiding citizen, put their thoughts toward how not to get caught in future.

At the time, Napster were a U.S. corporation, and so securing a lawsuit against them was relatively easy for Metallica, as it would be for any copyright holder looking to serve a notice within their own country. But things get much trickier when U.S. copyrighted material is being pirated on websites based elsewhere in the world, which brings us to the latest piece of copyright legislation from the Washington House of Representatives, the aptly named Stop Online Piracy Act.

The bill itself, which can be found here, has come under considerable criticism, most notably from Internet giants Google and Yahoo! Inc among others, for what has been perceived as a very gung-ho approach to the problem of foreign Internet piracy.

The legislation would essentially allow any private party claiming to be the copyright holder to contact the advertising and payment providers of a website and demand they pull the plug, as well as allowing the U.S. Justice Department to have native search engines or similar websites block search results based on suspect search parameters or keywords such as “download” or “torrent”.

In a recent hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, Katherine Oyama of Google testified that the corporation “…cannot support the bill as written, as it would expose law-abiding U.S. Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities… [and] sets a precedent in favour of Internet censorship and could jeopardize our nation’s cybersecurity.”

The bill definitely has its supporters, chiefly within America’s creative sectors like Hollywood and the music industry. Michael O’Leary (not to be confused with the Ryanair boss), in charge of global policy for the Motion Picture Association of America, said in his testimony that “every day, these people go to work to create a product – one of our country’s most creative, most innovative, most widely-recognized and most beloved products. And every day, over and over, that product is stolen, sometimes with nothing more than the click of a mouse.” O’Leary went on to assert that current law is not sufficient in bringing many internet pirates to justice because the websites they use operate on the sole purpose of trafficking stolen content, and being based overseas, “simply thumb their noses at U.S. law.”

Michael O’Leary, and others who have both a financial and emotional stake in the illegal distribution of their work, have every right to have their concerns. However, the key concern that Google and other internet companies raise is that U.S. lawmakers are seen to be “napalming the jungle”, for want of a less crude metaphor; blocking an entire internet search based on search criteria may unnecessarily block many innocent websites along with the guilty ones, essentially depriving legitimate businesses of revenue.

Furthermore, allowing a private party to cripple or freeze a supposedly offending website’s assets without the prior intervention of law enforcement is a power that could easily find itself abused, and indeed already has in areas where similar rules have been enforced. YouTube, for instance, have long upheld a policy of “guilty until proven innocent” with regard to supposed copyright holders filing claims against other users for using their material under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The video in question is immediately removed whether the claim was legitimate or not, and the act of serving a false DMCA notice, a criminal offense though it is, has become a popular method of censorship among YouTube’s less fair-minded users.

When applied to a more general web-wide law, this could present genuine cause for alarm, and as Oyama argues, "As long as there is money to be made pushing pirated and counterfeit products, tech-savvy criminals around the world will find ways to sell these products online."

Google’s testimony did, however, offer a solution, cutting off illicit websites’ revenue and funding via the judicial system rather than an arbitrary notice, arguing that “Policymakers should aim squarely at the ‘worst of the worst’ foreign websites without ensnaring legitimate technologies and businesses.”

The Senate already cleared one copyright bill in September of this year, though it did not include the notice procedure for private parties to request the severance of infringing websites’ advertising and payment services.

Both Katherine Oyama’s and Michael O’Leary’s testimonies from the November 16^th hearing can be found below.