US PRO-IP Act of 2008 may threaten Web spam
On September 13, 2008, President George W. Bush signed the PRO-IP Act of 2008. This law significantly increases the Federal government’s involvement in the prosecution of intellectual property rights violations. Ars Technica reviews some of the hyperbole surrounding the PRO-IP Act, naming the unseen powers behind the act as “Big Content”.
The artists, writers, and musicians who actually create the content are NOT Big Content. Rather, their facilitators — the companies that market the created works and the organizations that oversee the collection and distribution of royalties — constitute Big Content. In other words, a segment of Corporate America including organizations like the RIAA (who have sued teenagers for thousands of dollars in compensatory damages over music file swapping) and MPAA (the RIAA of the film industry) has shaped a law that probably will have far-reaching ramifications.
Under previous copyright law, intellectual property rights owners could ask for but not necessarily receive compensatory judgements — that is, if you used one of my works to earn $1,000,000 and pay me nothing, I could have asked the courts to award to me whatever I should have earned from your $1,000,000 in revenue. If my works are registered with the Registrar of Copyrights (an office attached to the Library of Congress), I could have also sought statutory and punitive damages. Statutory damages under the old law maxed out at $250,000 per infringement. Punitive damages could run into the millions of dollars (or billions if you’re Google).
Under the new law, statutory damages are significantly increased. Also, convicted Intellectual Property counterfeiters forfeit all of their assets involved in the production, distribution, and sale of copyrighted works. You could lose your home, your computer, your bank accounts — everything attached to whatever Web business you operate.
But wait! You’re thinking, “This is about file sharing, and no one has yet sued me for copyright infringement!” You need to read between the lines, Buckwheat.
The new law also creates an administrative office to protect intellectual property rights. Yes, folks, this law has established Intellectual Property Rights police with Federal authority to seek warrants against you, seize your assets, shut down your servers, and arrest you (or arrange for you to be arrested) at work, at home, or at school.
They’ll ostensibly be focusing on people who counterfeit works in volume. But the law also covers the use of copyrighted works employed for gain in any capacity. That is, if you copy my protected works and put ads on your pirated copy, you’ll be committing a felony, punishable by several million dollars in fines and forfeiture of your personal assets.
The law was designed to do what the RIAA and MPAA haven’t been able to do through civil litigation: Big Content is trying to shut down massive file sharing that goes on across the Internet. They want to stop song-swapping networks (and book-swapping, movie-swapping, etc.) that have so far eluded the industrial espionage campaigns being waged against them.
Since private industry has been unable to stop the torrent of copyright infringements across the Internet, maybe Uncle Sam will have better luck. The Federal government will be empowered to mobilize local law enforcement agencies to investigate and crack down on small-time operators who are infringing in a big way on IPR owners’ revenues.
And the neat thing about this law is that it doesn’t require anyone to prove how much money they are losing. All they have to do is claim that your activity is depriving them of legitimate revenues.
In short, a law that was written to shift the burden of investigation and prosecution from private industry to government, as well as to increase the penalties and judgments violators may be subject to, looks on the surface like it’s only going to affect people who distribute movies, books, art, and music illegally across the Internet. But there is no stipulation excluding Web copy. If Sony BMG doesn’t have to calculate damages, neither do I.
Which means that all the content scrapers who build made-for-advertising sites with other people’s intellectual property may soon be felons on the run. It’s cost-prohibitive for me to enforce DMCA take-down notices to every Web spammer I find, but it costs me almost nothing to report criminal activity to the Federal government and let the tax-payers bear the cost of shutting you down.
Search engines like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! of course should oppose this law, since they derive some portion of their revenues from the violation of copyrights. Their advertising programs incentivize the theft of intellectual property rights — and the law addresses THAT kind of criminal activity, too.
It’s a great day for Big Content. But maybe it’s a great day for Web publishers who find spammers’ sites outranking their original content, too.
And Web boilerplate copy may become even more gawky and monstrous as people start disclaiming inappropriate uses of copy, etc., etc., etc.
The bottom line here is: no one really knows when the law will be tested in this way. But someone, somewhere, is surely going to complain to the Federal government about Web spam that is depriving them of revenue. It may take more than one complaint, but the day is coming when jack-booted thugs — I mean, Copyright Police — break down someone’s door, steal someone’s computer — I mean, confiscate evidence — and prosecute a kid for violation of intellectual property rights. Mom and Dad won’t even know what was happening.
All because it’s so easy to profit from other people’s works.
Think about it.
www.seo-theory.com
published @ October 18, 2008