WEEK 5 EOC: Changes with Internet law.

                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.

                “Perhaps the most galling thing about SOPA in its original construction is that it let IP owners take these actions without a single court appearance or judicial sign-off. All it required was a single letter claiming a "good faith belief" that the target site has infringed on its content.”

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.