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Volume 68, No. 12
December 1, 2011
Pondering intellectual property in the age of SOPA and the internet By Karen Antonacci The Pan American Once educated in the means and low on cash, most college students will face the moral dilemma: to pay for copyrighted content the traditional way or download it illegally from the internet. Further complicating matters is the new bill currently before the House Judiciary Committee, Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), that could require the U.S. Attorney General to recommend certain websites be blocked from search engines and internet service providers if the sites were posting or allowing the posting of illegal copyrighted material. One of the most controversial aspects of the bill is the feature that would increase responsibility for sites that host user-posted content, like Youtube, Flickr, Tumblr, Reddit and Facebook. Sites like these would have to strictly self-police their users to avoid being reported as a copyright infringement site and having parts of the site blocked from ISPs and search engines. Clay Young, is an avid downloader of content on the web and said he found the bill ludicrous and has signed a few petitions against it. Particularly, he takes issue with holding the websites responsible for userposted content. “If I put a stolen item in your car, and they find it and you’re at fault, then that’s ridiculous,” the 23-year old nursing major said. “(If it is passed) I would find a way around it, it would be easy to find a way around it.” On the moral dilemma, Young said he definitely thinks it’s wrong, but he doesn’t have a problem with getting movies, books, music and TV programs online for free. “It is getting copyrighted material without paying the copyright owner or without a license to do it,” he said. “It’s cheaper, it’s easier and it’s very low risk.” As a musician with two albums on iTunes, Richard Isaac Hays disagreed and said that downloading content from the internet might be inevitable but is definitely not right. “I can’t really stop people from doing what they’re doing, but personally I really don’t appreciate it because it’s killing the
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music industry, particularly, it’s killing art,” the senior from Monterrey, Mexico said. “I’m not really mad at (the listeners) I want them to listen to my music, but at the same time I wish they loved me enough that they cared enough to pay… ‘Is my music worth it?’ That’s the way I see it.” Hays explained that he felt the iTunes price of one dollar a song was beyond reasonable to support artists, especially new artists who might be struggling, and illegally downloading was taking that much needed dollar from an artist. In regards to SOPA, however, Hays said he believed going after user-posted content sites like Youtube might not be beneficial to the music industry. “I don’t think it’s healthy for them to
block access to music videos and stuff like that, we should be able to watch those things…what I do think is wrong is these massive hackers that invent things like Napster and enable people to download, Bit Torrents and stuff like that. Block those sites so nobody can get to it,” he said. Like users of the failed Napster, the now more popular torrents, or downloads of content, Samantha Rodriguez said she used to get her music from the recently shut down Limewire but started paying for tracks through iTunes due to a lower security risk and the acquisition of a debit card. “(Limewire) was too much hassle,” the 20-year-old sophomore said. “I used a different computer for that because I
didn’t want my laptop to get viruses, so if I downloaded something, I would have to change it with the pin drive…If I had one song I wanted, then I would get it, but if it’s a list, I’m not going to bother with it.” Rodriguez said her finances used to prevent her from paying for music, even though she wanted to. “I’m pretty sure if I had the money, I would go out and buy the CD…For Nikki Minaj, I went and downloaded two songs and then I went and got more off iTunes because I was able to.” Music is not the only thing being shared illegally online. Texts or programs required by classes can sometimes cost hundreds of dollars. Abraham Cantu, an educational leadership major, said
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that while obtaining content illegally was wrong, when using the content to teach students, the ends might one day justify the means. “We see it as we’re educating students, they could eventually add to that industry, whether it’s the music industry or the movie industry, we see it as we’re using their texts or their information to help (the industries),” he said. As for SOPA, the Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Nov. 16 and is still open to discussions or debates on the bill and is supported by more than 20 sponsors in the house. The bill is opposed and has been protested by sites including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and house minority leader Nancy Pelosi.