The Internet: The war over pirated music, movies, and books

Call it the day the Internet fought back, said Clarence Page in the Chicago Tribune. For 24 hours last week, some of the world’s most popular websites—among them Wikipedia, Craigslist, and social news website Reddit—shut themselves down. Other sites, such as Google, blacked out their logos for the day, while 7 million people signed an online petition. This “historic online protest” was organized in opposition to two bills in Congress designed to crack down on Internet piracy. The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act called for a “blacklist” of rogue sites that allow Internet users to illegally download movies, music, and books for free, and proposed giving the government new powers to drive them out of business. But website operators said the laws would have given Congress unprecedented power to shut down any site that disseminated copyrighted material even without knowing it—such as YouTube, where millions of users regularly upload bootlegged TV shows and videos without the site’s consent. The resulting protests got Washington’s attention, and in just 48 hours, the two bills were dead. But the problem remains: How do you fight the theft of intellectual content in a manner that satisfies “both the websites and the copyright holders”?

Ending “the Internet revolution’’ isn’t the answer, said Gary Shapiro in FoxNews.com. Giant media, record, and movie companies spent millions to create and lobby for this draconian legislation, which would have destroyed the online freedom enjoyed by millions. These companies have owned Congress for decades, persuading lawmakers to extend the length of copyright protection 14 times since the 1970s, and creating outlandish penalties for infringement. More than 30,000 Americans have been hit with ruinous lawsuits brought by recording and publishing companies, including Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mom fined $1.9 million for illegally downloading 24 songs. Now, with last week’s protest, “the American people have rebelled.”

This wasn’t a “victory for the common man,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Instead, it was a huge win for tech-industry giants like Google, which portrayed themselves as “scrappy innovators” standing up to Big Brother and greedy Hollywood lobbyists. But the bills were “far more modest than this cyber tantrum suggests.” They primarily targeted pirate firms in Russia, China, and other foreign countries that trade in illegal content, not Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube users. In reality, the “e-vangelists’’ object to the idea of copyright itself; they want no restriction on the free flow of pirated music, movies, and books. Such pirated material now accounts for almost a fourth of all Internet traffic.

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Actually, “a little copyright infringement’’ is good for society, said Matthew Yglesias in Slate.com. Most people who download pirated movies or music wouldn’t have paid for it through legitimate channels, so these industries’ claims of massive losses are exaggerated. The existence of file-sharing sites, moreover, puts “valuable consumer pressure” on content creators to come up with convenient, innovative, and cheaper alternatives to CDs and DVDs; without piracy, we wouldn’t have iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, or Pandora. We can live with a manageable amount of copyright infringement, just as we live with public libraries and used bookstores.

Easy for you to say as a content consumer, said Peter Lerangis in the New York Daily News. But piracy is killing the livelihoods of writers like me. Internet users upload and download illegal copies of my children’s books every day, and the onus is currently on me to discover and report each individual theft. The ability of musicians, artists, and writers to live off their creative work is being taken away, just because “some sweaty kid in his mom’s basement in Romania” feels like stealing it and sharing it with the world.

Clearly, we do need more protection for intellectual content on the Internet, said David Pogue in NYTimes.com. Just because technology now makes it possible to duplicate a creative work, and distribute infinite copies of it without cost, doesn’t mean that activity isn’t “shoplifting.’’ Yet many Internet activists take the absurd position that free movies, free music, free books, and “free fun’’ of all kinds are their “natural-born rights,” and that the “big evil government” shouldn’t take them away. Now that Congress’s sloppily worded anti-piracy laws have been killed, it’s time to try again. “Both sides have an obligation to do the right thing.’’ We need legislation that would let the sharing spirit of the Web flourish, while protecting the rights of talented, hardworking people who create our culture’s art and entertainment.