How has
the internet changed legal issues?
Well, a great example is the entire concept of “Piracy”. For
those who don’t know, Piracy is when you download a product, such as a movie or
song, without buying it. You don’t have a license to that product. A problem
occurs when someone who DID license the product, decides to share it online,
with a mass number of people. Many of whom the user doesn’t know, and probably
never will.
Now, Piracy has been dealt with over the years, companies
and artists are trying to make their copyrights harder and harder to steal or
upload. Yet it can still happen. Because just as quickly as the new protections
come out, so do those who know how to get around it.
Piracy has been made illegal in the United States, however
the problem occurs, how do we know someone took something? Well, We can track
the I.P. Addresses of those whom download a product. Which will track them down
to the location of the router the device used was connected to. But here, a new
issue occurs. Not everyone who owns a wireless modem knows how to set
protection on themselves from this issue. People can connect to a modem, owned
by someone else, and illegally download products. Yet at this point, as soon as
they disconnect, they can’t be found, and have made off with the product.
The Supreme Court has tried to make Piracy harder with the Stop
Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. However, if you looked closely at the bill, SOPA
wasn’t exactly the best idea. You would never actually need to appear in court.
Another problem this makes, is it holds the sites that are
basically run by users, (facebook, youtube, tumblr, blogger, etc…) accountable
for anything their users submit as a “status, tweet, or comment”.
Did you know that a fine for an illegally downloaded song
can be as much as $220,000? One
case actually ended up costing someone 1.92 Million dollars. The accused
had downloaded 24 tracks of music, and then was charged 80,000 for each track.
That was basically one CD. And it cost the accused nearly $2,000,000.
Am I saying Piracy is good? Or that we should be allowed to
do it? No. You are still stealing someone’s intellectual property. However, the
laws haven’t exactly caught up to how it should be handled. And even though we
have systems in place, they aren’t exactly what I’d call trustworthy.