The swirl of sentiment against the proposed pieces of legislation titled "PROTECT IP" and the "Stop Online Piracy Act" warms my heart. As a citizen of the web, one with active participation and use, it's a terrifying aspect how much power can be moved to a third party. These acts seek to disrupt the way in which copyright infringement and piracy occur on the web and put a stop to it. Obviously, the people most supportive of these measures would be the ones who benefit financially (major movie studios and record companies). The common call? "They want to censor the Internet." While not entirely true in theory, as per usual it is the practice that is important.
The current piece of legislation that exists on the matter is known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which allows for a key principle. This is known as the safe harbor protection. That is to say, if there is an infringement to be found, it is not the fault of the Internet Service Provider or content holder (example, YouTube). The introduced legislation seeks to create third party police forces by making ISPs responsible for what content sites have come up.
Worse still, the process by which one can get content taken down is not very stringent. Such has already been an issue in the case of Viacom v. YouTube. The content host (YouTube) did not sift through each and every piece of content that was uploaded in order to determine whether or not any of it violated copyright. According to Viacom, in that case, it wasn't good enough. By the end though, the ruling came down in support of YouTube. YouTube did not have an obligation to seek out the copyrights related to the content uploaded. This obligation belonged to the copyright holder. To make it even murkier, there were claims in the midst of the trial that Viacom was using agents to upload the material to YouTube in order to make claims against the site.
Where we are now, though, is something more intense. If copyright holders do not think existing statutes are enough, then we get to the proposed legislation. Enforcement is key, but how can we get it without it reaching beyond its intended bounds? The biggest fears are that these means will be abused to a form of Internet censorship that benefits only those making the financial claims. This happens when copyright holders are able to make the claims and hold the ISPs and websites responsible for the infringing content. Each business then has self-interest to intensely vet every piece of content in order to prevent itself from being shut down. Even though the amount of illegal material verses legal material is by no means close. A 99 percent legal website performing legitimate purposes is at risk here, and benefit again arises only to those with copyright holdings.
The issue surely isn't that people want to protect their property, but the means by which they seek to do so. Think of it this way: You walk into an open market run by a company, one with a section with plenty of useful products and information that people bring to give away. But there are some, which are run down and paid no heed. This company provides people with a means to pursue their end. That is to say, they want somewhere to display what they have.
At first, it sounds like a flea market (eBay), but think of it more as an open exchange. There's one problem: someone has brought in something that they don't own, and they are giving it away as such. The question then is who is to blame?
Should the market have checked each person and what they bring in, or not? If they should have, according to the new legislation, the entire operation can be cut off. The mostly good goes away because a small party found a little bit of bad. Again, not the issue that the real owner finds their things being given away without permission, but that all the other benefits must too go, because the entire venue now operates illegally according to that one owner perceiving a wrong.
Relate vendor to ISP or content host and products exchanged to Intellectual Property and people to copyright holders. The providers pay huge fines for that little mistake. And when money is on the line, people are obviously willing to go to restrictive means. It's a dark time to be had when everyone wanting to share loses the means to do so because a few did the wrong thing.
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