There are a lot of arguments to be made in the piracy debate—both for and against. This article will not examine those. Ever received—or heard of—those ‘cease and desist’ letters from folks like the MPAA or ISPs like Comcast? A proposed piece of legislation in the U.S. Senate would make those look like fan mail.
Anti-piracy proposal would fragment the Internet
The first thing that has to be noted here is that this is simply a proposed law. Not in committee, not coming up for a vote, simply a proposed piece of legislation. For now. Earlier in the summer and throughout his administration, President Obama has shown himself to be a supporter of nearly any measure intended to combat piracy, so passage of this law has to be taken seriously.
What is the law? Preliminarily called the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act”, it was introduced with bi-partisan support by Sen. Orin Hatch of Utah. Considering the definition of piracy as the theft of intellectual property, it would seem that any way to combat piracy would be a good thing, but the details of how the act would work are worth examining. Rather than the current model, which requires copyright holders themselves or third-party trade groups like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to initiate a civil suit (usually preceded by a letter asking the infringer to ‘cease and desist’), the job would be shifted to the U.S. Department of Justice.
A prior anti-piracy law was stripped of such a measure at the behest of the previous White House before it passed the Senate in 2008. Their concern at the time was that lawyers under the Department of Justice would, in effect, be doing pro bono work at the behest of copyright holders. All of the costs would accrue to the taxpayers paying their salaries, while the monetary gain would go to the industries covered by the suit. Financial reasons are a concern, but there is more worth looking at in the bill.
Understanding why this law is potentially dangerous. The real crux of the bill is that it would give the DOJ the power to ask a judge for an injunction which would block the domain of a given website—something, on the face of the legal requirement to defend intellectual property, a judge would likely grant. For example, visitors to the infamous piratebay.org originating from a U.S. IP address would only receive a NXDOMAIN error (similar to HTTP error 404 ‘Site Not Found’). This is more than superficially similar to the censorship of the Internet currently done in the People’s Republic of China—something major U.S. corporations like Google have now washed their hands of. Trade groups like the MPAA, however, are applauding the measure.
This is not an attempt to defend piracy, but taking the policy that certain parts of the Internet are simply off-limits would seem to violate the First Amendment. Moreover, it would inevitably lead to underground users and other countries creating their own root DNS servers. The Internet would no longer be the ‘World Wide Web’.
Not to mention that simply blocking a domain does nothing to prevent users from manually entering an IP address—or simply turning sites into Protean entities who change their domain names every time they are blocked. The cost is the censorship of the Internet, and the benefit is a very easy to circumvent block on infringing sites.
Reasonable people can debate the piracy issue, but this law as proposed poses a severe threat to the freedom of the Internet even as ‘net neutrality’ discussions continue. Courtesy of Wired, you can read it yourself here.
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