Online piracy
Rights and wronged
An American anti-piracy bill tries to stem the global theft of intellectual property
火把节是哪个族1、春游作文ILLEGAL copying and sharing of copyrighted material is hard enough to stop within a country. But when the internet takes traffic across borders it is almost unmanageable. American-owned intellectual property, say, may be uploaded in one country and downloaded in a cond, via a website who computers are in a third, operated by anonymous enthusiasts (or criminals) from goodness-knows-where. So whom do you sue, and in which courts? The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), now before America’s Congress, is the latest of many recent attempts to defend property rights on the internet.
2、方驾The bill aims to cut off Americans’ access to foreign pirate websites by squeezing intermediaries. Rights-holders, such as Hollywood film studios, will be able to request that a credit-card firm or advertising network stop doing business with a foreign site; or ask a ar
ch engine to take down links to the site; or ask an internet-rvice provider to block the site’s domain name, making it harder to reach. The intermediary then has just five days to comply or rebut the complaint; after that the rights-holder can go to court.
户外游戏小班教案3、This would rope intermediaries into law enforcement to an unprecedented degree, and give rights-holders exceptional power. Critics of the bill say that takedown requests and court orders will swamp smaller firms and start-ups. They say that blocking entire websites via their domain name smacks of censorship, and that determined downloaders will anyway find the block easy to bypass.
4、Two mighty coalitions have formed around SOPA. Supporting the bill are not only film studios and music labels, but also drug firms and other manufacturers. Though SOPA itlf does not affect them, they have a big interest in fighting any kind of intellectual-property infringement. On the other side are internet companies, technology investors and digital activists, who share an interest in disrupting business models and a dislike for anything that smacks of old-fashioned regulation.
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5、Constantly changing technology makes data on piracy unreliable. Monitors struggle to distinguish the effect of deterrence from the ri of easy, cheap alternatives to piratical downloading, such as legal online music rvices. Nor do they know how much piracy has cut legal sales of music and films, and how much blame should go to shifting consumer tastes. But the fight against intellectual-property theft is waged hard. It rembles a bit the fight against illegal drugs: clamp down in one place, and the trade sprouts elwhere.
四年级上册第一单元思维导图6、The Social Science Rearch Council, an American non-profit body, found in a study this year “little evidence—and indeed few claims—that enforcement efforts to date have had any impact whatsoever on the overall supply [of pirated media].”
7、With great effort, courts have clod or hampered some big “peer-to-peer” file-sharing sites (the allow urs to swap files without going via a central computer). But others spring up in their place. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI)
estimated that music-sharing doubled between 2006 and 2008.海珍珠
8、Growing even faster, though, are cyber-lockers such as RapidShare. The let people share links to files they have uploaded to the “cloud”, the huge arrays of easily accessible rvers that host all manner of data. A few such cyber-lockers (largely out of the direct reach of American justice) now have more visitors than the top peer-to-peer sites. Illegal streaming rvices and piracy via mobile devices, the IFPI says, are the next big threat.
9、In the eyes of rights-holders, the law ems shamefully lax. In 1998 America adopted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which criminalid many of the methods ud to copy digital content, but also established “safe harbours”, explicitly protecting intermediaries such as arch engines and social networks from procution for their urs’ actions. Several other rich countries have similar laws. The pirates just moved their illegal activity to loor jurisdictions, such as Sweden—while still benefiting from American-bad arch engines and payment systems. Now the rights-holders e intermediaries as the only point where they can choke the illegal trade. “This is the last st
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and—the guys who have the pipes,” says Peter Mensch of Q Prime, which reprents bands such as Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
10、Intermediaries are under fire on other fronts too, notes Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of the Oxford Internet Institute. Google, for instance, faces a number of lawsuits in Europe for providing links to material that breaches privacy laws. A handful of European and Asian countries have adopted or propod “graduatedrespon” laws. The oblige internet-rvice providers to shut off rvice from urs suspected of downloading illegal files (they get two warnings first).
11、This approach is working, argues Frances Moore of the IFPI. In South Korea, one of the first places to adopt such a law, most people stop downloading files after the first warning and most of the rest stop after the cond, she says. In Spain, which pasd an anti-piracy law only in March, music sales have dropped faster than the global average. In 2010 Nieln, a market-rearch firm, estimated that 45% of Spanish internet urs visited illegal music-distribution rvices, against 23% in the top five European markets.
