It may not be discussed as openly as it was perhaps a year ago, but piracy in regards to downloading is still a hot topic. How do I know it when I'm not seeing new articles about it splashed across the different news sites? It's quite simple. The search history of my analytics service shows it to me every single day.
A few hours ago, I spotted this search phrase in my analytics program: "i live in my own little world. but it's okay,they know me here." (That's exactly how it was entered. I simply cut and pasted it.) It made me start thinking about things that are going on around me; things that I know I'm powerless to change.
Gasoline and Gasoline Engines
Gasoline was invented prior to the coining of the word in 1865, although the exact date is unknown. The first gasoline-powered engine was built in 1885, more than 122 years ago. Why are people still driving vehicles that run on gasoline? I don't know which business sector is behind it, either the automotive industry or the oil industry or both, but they've done a good job of stifling innovation over the years. It isn't their fault, however, it's ours. "Ours" meaning American citizens and residents. We allowed them to get away with it.
Technology
It's no wonder that countries like China and India are starting to pass the US in technology (if they already haven't). Japan is already technologically superior to the US. In some ways, so is South Korea. How far down on the totem pole do we want to be? It's all about greed and power. Those with the power are greedy and will continue to be that way for as long as we let them, but what can we do about it? Our government won't do anything because most politicians are bought by the highest bidder and the ones that aren't, well, they don't get very far. Peons like me don't have enough power to make a dent in either business or politics.
Copyrights
How about the effects of copyright laws on innovation? Current US copyright laws keeps copyrighted works protected longer than most people will remain alive. That wasn't the intent of the founding fathers, but like everything else, power and greed changed all that. The intent was to ensure compensation for creators of new works for a limited period of time. After that, the works would enter the public domain where other people could use those works to innovate in other ways. The current laws make it impossible, basically keeping copyright protection in effect for an unlimited amount of time.
Do You Care?
I sometimes feel like I'm writing to a mindless throng of people who are either clueless or just don't care about things that continue to happen around us. I know I'm not the only blog author that feels this way, but there's not much I or they can do about it. While the main intent of my blog (believe it or not) is to give other blogs a boost, the popularity level of my blog isn't high enough to do much good on its own. It now averages around 300 unique visitors per day and the searchers are looking for things that just aren't there.
Illegal file sharing (more accurately described as copyright infringement) has been plaguing copyright holders since bulletin board systems started and speeds were limited to sub-1 kbps transmission rates. That was the 1980s. Welcome to 2007 where entire movies, television episodes and software packages can be downloaded in their entirety in a matter of minutes.
While the USENET has always been a bastion for file sharers, it wasn't until the original Napster showed up that the RIAA started suing to protect the interest of the music labels. Napster was shut down in 2002, but the publicity it generated also generated clones and other types of file sharing services. One of these, Kazaa, has been the service the RIAA has primarily targeted the users of. The rest is, as they say, history.
Bram Cohen designed the BitTorrent protocol in 2001, distributing the very first client for it and using it on his own website. It didn't take long for other programmers to create clients of their own, using a variety of programming languages. The clients run on all manner of computer platforms, including Linux and Windows.
The advantage of the BitTorrent clients, and the protocol itself, is that "torrents" can be used to distribute anything in a very efficient manner. It saves the host a ton of bandwidth by using the upstream bandwidth of each computer that's downloading the file, and all of it happens seamlessly. There are literally thousands of legal torrents out there along with the illegal ones. Does the fact that piracy is being aided by this particular protocol make it evil? If you listen to the RIAA, the MPAA and other such types of organizations, you would think so. The real answer is the complete opposite. The problem is that the companies fighting piracy haven't adopted a business model that takes advantage of the protocol. Instead, they'd rather sue to protect the income stream they're comfortable with. The income stream they have control over.
There was a gaping void left by the shutdown of Napster, and websites that index torrents along with Apple's iTunes store, have filled that void. The entertainment industries were caught napping and with their pants down.
My favorite BitTorrent client is µTorrent. It works flawlessly on Windows XP, which I still use. I understand it works very well on Windows Vista too. Recently, while I was setting up my new computer, I downloaded some software packages on the old computer and burned them to CD. I then used those CDs to install the software on the new computer.
Before settling back down with Windows XP, I installed and tried to get Debian Linux to work for me. While I couldn't use it right then, the fact that Debian provided complete CD and DVD downloads via torrents made that determination much quicker than FTP. I'd say at least 10 times quicker.
I attempted to download the OpenOffice.org office suite from their website, but only FTP was available. Knowing how slow FTP was compared to BitTorrent, I searched for the suite using the search engine at ScrapeTorrent and found it quickly. It downloaded fast and I had it installed on the new PC within half an hour.
This is what the BitTorrent protocol is all about — fast downloads of the files you're looking for. Sure you can download illegal copies of movies, TV shows and software, but that's only part of what can be done with the protocol. Other software clients, not only BitTorrent clients, are using the protocol to distribute media files of all kinds. In my book, there's nothing evil about that at all.
Mark of MeAndMyDrum posted a reminder article (at least for me) with the purpose of debunking the myths about copyright law.
This blog, and many blogs like it, is directly affected by copyright laws. When I write a mini-review or commentary about a movie, TV show, or whatever and include a video clip, I'm left with the problem of trying to figure out if the person who posted the clip had the authority to do so.
Most YouTube members use member names that have nothing to do with their real name or their companies. The exceptions I've seen are NBC and Viacom. Even David Hewlett (Dr. Rodney McKay of Stargate: Atlantis fame) uses "h0rrid" as his member name. How am I, the casual blog writer that I am, supposed to know if a particular video is sanctioned by the author or studio?
I have no desire to infringe on anyone's copyrights, but I find it difficult to know what's allowed to be on YouTube and what isn't. Obviously, a complete TV show or movie (in multiple clips) is a clear copyright violation. Movie trailers, for example, are not so clear. I've been paid to write sponsored posts to hype movies soon to be released and the studios are the ones that put the trailers on YouTube in the first place.
Google owns YouTube and it's Google that's being sued by Viacom for having illegal videos online. If I'm having trouble identifying illegal content on YouTube, how much more so it must be for the employees of YouTube.
I find the best video for a particular topic that I can find and link to it. I have to go through all the videos at least once per month to see if any of them have been removed from YouTube. Sometimes they say why a particular video was removed and sometimes they don't.
(Image obtained from ABC News.)
Have you ever written something that isn't within your areas of expertise and regretted writing it? Does an article keep coming back to haunt you? This has happened to me three times so far. Short of deleting the original article, there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.
When I wrote Downloading Pirated Anything Is NOT Illegal, I opened up a veritable can of worms. Steve of Ramblings from the Marginalized submitted it to Digg on March 20th, 2007. According to my stats at the time, it was viewed more than 11,000 times that day. It was at the top of the front page for hours.
On July 18th or 19th (depending on your time zone), someone visiting from StumbleUpon decided to stumble the article and it received another 4,000 page views before it slowed down. I wrote about it in my article, Yesterday – Another Banner Day for Untwisted Vortex!
Approximately 8 hours ago, someone visiting from StumbleUpon spotted it again and gave it a thumbs down. It might has well have been a thumbs up because it's been viewed more than 400 times today. I have no idea how many visitors it will generate before it slows down again.
I specifically excluded the article from my "Popular Posts" widget, along with quite a few others, because that's not the kind of image I want to project for my blog. I realize that some bloggers would just about kill for traffic like that, but it's not the kind of traffic I'm looking for. Perhaps I'm "looking a gift horse in the mouth". According to the latest statistics from Google Analytics, that article alone has generated more than 55,000 page views.
A few short days after I read the Blog-Op article about the fact that Mud Sticks-Content Theft Or Not, I witnessed an exchange on a forum I recently joined where one blog author accused another of image theft.
These types of accusations, true or false, damage both the reputations of the accuser and the accused. I read the exchange of the former and the one-sided accusations of the latter and I find that the accusations are unfounded in both cases. Neither of the accusers appeared to ask anything of the accused before making the accusations. They made assumptions that the accused parties were guilty before getting the facts.
Many blog authors use images from other sources. Some don't realize that the images in question are not to be used anywhere else. Usually, attribution of the source and/or linking to the source is all that is required to satisfy the holder of the copyright. The worst case scenario involves removing images at the copyright holder's request. Sometimes it's not that easy. Due to the increased number of legitimate image sharing sites, a blog author may obtain an image from a source that was not authorized to possess it. This is the point where open lines of communication should occur before accusations are made or legal action is taken.
I was accused of copyright infringement when I published a copy of a web comic in Lesbians!. The author's name and website were not visible in the image that I found via StumbleUpon. I made the mistake of not stating where I found it and the author/artist found it and thought I had taken it from his website. After a few email messages were exchanged, he understood and only asked that I link to his website, which I did willingly and without any thoughts of malice. He's been back to my blog many times because of the referrals coming from my blog.
Out of curiosity, I did a Google search for the title of my recent article, The Power of Positive Thinking. I was shocked to find other articles with titles almost exactly the same. Although I never saw those before I wrote my article, I can see how someone might think I was plagiarizing or infringing on their content copyrights. This is the case of the first accusation I mentioned above. When millions of active blog authors (yes, millions) are continuously writing new articles, it's only a matter of time before one author writes an article that is very similar to one that has already been written. Coincidence does not equal causality.
The effect of the accusations is that many readers will no longer trust the writings of either the accusers or the accused parties. It's better, much better, to collect your facts and keep the mud-slinging away from the public until all other recourses are exhausted.
This has been all over the news for a couple of days. Last Monday (it's Thursday morning here in the Philippines), US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales proposed "The Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007" to members of Congress.
While I won't go into detail and analyze what's already been publicized about this (see Wired's Proposed Crime of the Century: Attempted Copyright Infringement for a comprehensive analysis), what I will do is point out something that others may have overlooked. I'm focusing on one specific paragraph from their article:
"The bill would also criminalize the intent to commit copyright crimes, which the Justice Department claims brings copyright more in line with other criminal laws. Currently, an infringing crime actually has to have taken place in order for prosecutors to bring a case. The new legislation, if passed, would criminalize the mere attempt."
Does anyone realize the implications this would have on the average Internet user? Current US copyright laws define copyright infringement as a civil matter, except in the case of piracy rings that are covered by another specific law. A civil matter means you can be sued for infringing. What this new bill would do, if passed, would elevate the status of copyright infringement to a criminal matter. All of a sudden, the government can prosecute you AND you can be sued for copyright infringement. Not only that, there are provisions in the bill that would allow the government to seize anything that was used in the infringement.
The most worrisome part of the bill is that attempted copyright infringement will carry the same penalties as actually doing it. That reaches a little too close to home. We all know (or at least most of us) that sharing/uploading copyrighted works without permission is blatant copyright infringement and can result in large settlements in or out of court. We also know that it's not cost effective for the IP holders to chase down and sue those who receive/download copyrighted works because of the limited value of the works in a single instance.
This bill would change all that. The copyright holders would no longer need to sue you. They would just inform law enforcement officials and you'd be incarcerated with only a shred of evidence to support their claims. Just owning a computer with a CD or DVD burner installed would be enough for them to charge you with an "attempt" to infringe on someone's copyright.
Current bittorrent websites continue to index and list illegally distributed copyrighted media over high speed internet connections. The entertainment industries know they can't do anything about it as the law stands today. The websites are not infringing on copyrights because they are not distributing the media themselves. If you elevate copyright infringement to a criminal status, that changes instantly. The website owners and operators, and even the ISPs that provide the space and bandwidth, can be charged with aiding and abetting a criminal act.
Read the article link I provided. Then think about what I just wrote. Do you see a red herring like I do?
