The SOPAbox: Defeating online piracy by destroying the internet

Disclaimer: The Soapbox
column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not
necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid
of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column.

Unless you've been living under a rock, chances are you've heard of SOPA and PIPA.
The Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act are two radical pieces of
copyright legislation currently being pushed through the US government.
Although the stated intent of the new legislation is to provide
companies with additional tools with which to combat piracy, the bill's loose wording has raised some serious alarm bells.
Opponents to the proposed law say it would give corporations the
ability to shut down any almost any website under the guise of
protecting copyright infringement.

Gamers will be affected worst of all, as the loose wording of the law
makes any website with user-submitted content potentially vulnerable to a
shut down order. That could include YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, any
blog with a comment section, or even any online game with a chat system.
Perhaps the scariest part is that you'll be affected even if you're not
in the US, as one of the new law's enforcement mechanisms is to remove a
site from the DNS records, a move that assumes the US has jurisdiction
over the global Domain Name System. AOL is among many huge companies strongly opposing SOPA, and so naturally Massively opposes it too.

In this week's massive two-page Soapbox,
I make the case for why you should be worried about SOPA, and I suggest
what can be done to tackle piracy in the games industry. Comments can
be left on page two.

Current enforcement mechanisms

Companies in the film, music and games industries obviously have a need
to protect their copyrights and prevent misuse of their intellectual
properties. The internet has provided massive opportunities for piracy,
making it incredibly simple and cost-effective to illegally obtain
copies of games, films, and music. The use of digital formats means that
the old argument of pirate copies being lower quality no longer applies
as pirates are getting the full digital product for free.

The current system in place to stop this kind of copyright infringement is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
a piece of legislation designed to provide a fast-track method for
companies to get their copyrighted material removed from an offending
website without putting that website at risk.

Because of the DMCA's "safe harbour" rule, a website with user-submitted
content like YouTube is not held liable for the content its users post.
If you upload a song to YouTube, you might be breaking the law, but
YouTube isn't. When copyright owners find infringement like this, they
send the website owner a DMCA request, and the offending content is
selectively removed. The argument being put forward by corporations
supporting SOPA is that the DMCA doesn't work against websites that just
ignore the requests. Websites hosted in the US that ignore DMCA
requests can eventually be taken down, as the webhost company would be
aiding criminal activities if it refused, but foreign sites can't.

The spirit of the law

The US legal system has no jurisdiction over websites hosted outside the
US, so pirates usually just move their servers to another country and
ignore takedown requests. These "rogue websites" may be doing business
with people in the US, and the spirit of SOPA is to provide a mechanism
for blocking access to those websites for all US citizens.
Unfortunately, it's such a badly worded piece of legislation that it can be used to block access to almost any legitimate website.

A website can be classified as rogue if it is primarily engaged in
offering services that can enable or facilitate copyright violation, but
any website with user-submitted content fits that description. The
primary purpose of gaming forums and blogs, for example, is to offer
people a means to have text discussions. As text can be used to share
links to copyrighted material and therefore facilitate copyright
violation, those sites (including Facebook and Twitter) could easily be
deemed rogue if any user posts a link to copyrighted material. History
is replete with examples of people using the word of the law to defeat
the spirit of the law, and there's no reason to assume SOPA would be
treated any differently.