I will admit, when I saw the topic for this week’s blog I shuddered a little. I’ve had classes dealing with copyright law before and it’s always such a tangled subject. Having read a lot about copyright and patent lawsuits, I know that this is a difficult subject to tackle and I can imagine that it’s that much more difficult on the Internet.
Online, it’s easy to share documents and files, music and movies. We do it all the time, through emails and other websites. It’s become a basic part of our communication with each other; I can’t remember the last time I had a professor who didn’t put the syllabus up on Blackboard so they wouldn’t waste paper.
Last year, SOPA and PIPA were the big things to talk about-I actually wrote a paper on US copyright laws for a criminology class because I wanted to discuss these acts. The Internet was furious about them; Google and other websites had a “blackout day” where they rendered their websites useless for a day as protest against these two acts. They would have restricted Internet sharing much more than it already was. The file sharing behemoth MegaUpload was also shut down last year following a long FBI investigation into their website practices.
It’s really difficult to place copyrights on Internet works because it’s really hard to track Internet works. Files can be shared so easily and so quickly that it’s almost impossible to find someone who has not illegally downloaded something. We’re all guilty of it, I’m sure. I don’t quite subscribe to the idea that “piracy isn’t a victimless crime”, mainly because I think that the prices put on media we get form the Internet is ridiculous. It seems silly to have to pay almost two dollars for one song!
Of course, while it’s very easy to share things over the web, it’s also very easy to track those same things. If someone felt the need to print off copies of a book and pass them around to friends it would be very difficult to track, unless one could round up all the copies. But Internet copies are different. Search engines make it easy to find what you’re looking for, and once you’ve found it you can begin building a case against the person who violated the copyright.
There’s a fine line between public domain and copyright infringement, and I think that on the web the line becomes that much more fine.
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