I'm back! In recent life news, I got a few new gigs teaching college English and had to take a break from PFS Publishing as I settled in. While I might not be updating as frequently as before, I've got some fun new things planned to keep this site looking brand new.
But what better way to come back into the blogging fold than talking about the most pertinent issue on the internet right now: internet piracy.
SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, was a bill designed to stop internet piracy by making it mandatory that copyrights online be enforced with criminal charges. Tech website Gizmodo has an excellent breakdown of SOPA's main failure: it was an overly simplisitic overreach for a complex problem.
If someone was caught violating copyright, the website would get shut down. Sounds great. Now take a look at my little website: see that picture of Cloud & Aeris from Final Fantasy VII a few posts down? Yep, that's a copyright violation, and if SOPA had passed, bye-bye PFS and every blog in existence. That's becasue SOPA disregarded the idea of fair use - think of it as going five miles over the speed limit for copyright infringements - and that copyrights are mildly infringed upon all the time (that would cover parodies, cover songs, custom action figures, drawings of copyrighted characters, etc.).
SOPA would have also penalized large companies for not stopping social media sharing. Since Facebook Like-ing and Tweeting are now how we express our tastes to the world, this would have crippled all social media and effectively shut down the internet. Not a bright idea. Which is why SOPA was stopped.
But then an odd thing happened: Megaupload, a file-sharing site filled with pirated material (movies, TV shows, books, CDs, comic book, and more), was shut down and its owners were arrested for, you guessed it, copyright infringement. Anonymous, the mysterious internet hacker group, then shut down the FBI, the MPAA (the major movie organization) and RIAA (the major radio organization) in retaliation (the MPAA and RIAA were major backers of SOPA). Chris Dodd, the head of the MPAA, then went and threatened lawmakers to comply with his and Hollywood's wishes. Ugh.
The problem, though, is that you can't make money off fair use. And Megaupload created millions in revenues off copyrighted material that its owners weren't paying for. A blog can use a picture in a posting, especially if it's a public image or a promotional image, because that's generating interest for the original source while not making money directly off the image - this blog is more than just copyrighted images, after all. Original writing right here.
But completely pirating an entire movie? Whole different ballgame.
In other words, Congress needs to find a way to define what constitutes fair use in an internet world, as the old ways can't apply in a digital age. And they need to learn what the difference between outright piracy (Megaupload) and sharing something with the world is. Nobody ever went to jail for lending their neighbor the book or DVD they bought, after all.
And businesses need to realize that, yes, while wholesale piracy of your goods is wrong and immoral and should be illegal and punished accordingly, the world will never accept a totalitarian overtake of the internet. It just won't happen. The internet is free and if you can't figure out how to make it make money, that's your problem, not the public's.
