Piracy bill: A death sentence for the Web?

last updated 8 January 2015

Does Congress want to kill the Internet? asked the San Jose Mercury News in an editorial. If lawmakers pass a proposed new law called the Stop Online Piracy Act, the freedom that created companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo will be gone. This draconian legislation would give the government and copyright owners the power to shut down websites suspected of illegally sharing or selling movies, music, and other copyrighted material. What’s more, those sites’ owners would be held financially liable for any infringements. So if one rogue user posted bootleg footage of a Lady Gaga concert on YouTube, the government could shut down both YouTube and its owner, Google. To comply with this draconian law, said Rebecca MacKinnon in The New York Times, sites like Google and Twitter would need to employ thousands of people “to monitor and censor user content.” Does the U.S. really want to become China?

No, but we don’t want to become the Wild West, either, said Robert Levine in Salon.com. For three centuries, the work of writers, artists, musicians, and other people who create our culture has been protected by intellectual-property laws. Virtually overnight, the Internet has rendered those laws powerless, and pirated content of all kinds is now available in a few keystrokes, with firms like Google complicit in these copyright violations. Google’s search engine, for example, can lead you to newspaper articles and pirated music and movies that rightly belong to the people who created them. Google then sells ads to run alongside the list of stolen content, generating billions of dollars, while newspapers, publishing companies, the music industry, film studios, and other traditional media companies whither. If artists can’t charge for the culture they create, they’ll create a lot less of it—and everyone loses.

But even if the new anti-piracy law passes, said Jerry Brito in Time.com, history suggests that it will quickly become moot. Back in 2000, the government easily closed illegal music-sharing site Napster by focusing on its centralized computer server. Napster’s successor, BitTorrent, however, is hosted on millions of computers around the world, so it “can’t be shut down—even if it’s found to be illegal.” And computer whiz kids are working on even more sophisticated tools for sharing digital content in defiance of any central authority. The more governments try to control the Internet, “the more it will turn to sand around their fingers.”