Copyright Infringement

1504 Words4 Pages

Copyright Infringement: Why Legislation Won’t Help and More
On January 18th, 2012, over 75,000 websites voluntarily went dark ("Go on Strike!") to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Most notably, Wikipedia, the sixth most popular website in the world, blacked out all of its English language content for 24 hours ("Action.", “"Alexa Top 500 Global Sites."). Many other sites such as Google, Reddit, WordPress, Tumblr, Flickr and Vimeo posted links about the acts and/or enabled their users to black out their own content for 24 hours (“Action”). Tech companies, websites, and consumers alike feared the passage of these two pieces of legislation and flooded senators and representatives with phone calls and e-mails to persuade them. Blocking websites to discourage piracy is an inherently flawed plan that threatens the free, uncensored nature of the internet. To discourage piracy, the entertainment industry must make legal content more accessible to users than illegal content.
On the video sharing website YouTube, thousands of hours of video are uploaded each day(“Statistics”). The automatic filter Google constructed into YouTube’s basic framework will often filter out uploaded content it recognizes to be infringing on copyrights in order to remain compliant with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Passed in 1998, this law is the only legislation in place in the United States to protect copyright holders from online infringement. The DMCA also protects service providers from responsibility of the illegal content their users may post, provided that after infringing material is removed from the site in a timely manner after receiving a takedown notice (Digital Millennium Copyr...

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