Combating Online Piracy

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Combating Online Piracy
The term piracy has been in existence way before the invention of the internet. When we talk about online piracy we refer to that illegal act of copying materials on the internet that are copyrighted. This term originally refers to people in high seas who used to plunder ships but came to be used in such a context by Daniel Defoe who referred to people who were illegally copying his book in 1703 (Reilly 33). There are three main types of online piracies, which include; software piracy, movie piracy, and music piracy. Piracy today is a significant global concern. This does not mean children, who occasionally download illegal materials such as popular songs from the internet and share with friends. Though downloading songs without the rights is wrong, piracy here  is in reference to grandiose business-professionals who get up in the morning and put in a day of stealing copyrighted music, movies, games and software from the internet processing them and distributing them through peer to peer (P2P) or file sharing networks (Hagan 2010).
The effects of online piracy are debatable with proponents arguing that to some extent piracy helps (McCullag, 54). The argument is that you cannot assuredly say that piracy deprives artists off their income as people who pirate would not have bought the product anyway. Further, after pirating people see if they like the product and then start buying it or in the case of an artist like a musician, they attend live performances and eventually end up boosting the artist’s income. The opponents are of a very different opinion. They say it cuts off artists’ incomes, as they cannot manage many sales after their work has been pirated and not to mention artists are backed up by other supporting staff members such as engineers, publishers among others who cannot benefit from events such as live performances. This in the end causes artists of various natures to despair as they are made not to make a living off they art which reduces innovation.
The fight against online piracy and opposition of the same has been there, and it is not going to end just soon. Many techniques have been developed to stop online piracy, and while this has been ongoing, pirates have been working to develop means to beat these measures time after time (McCullag 43). There have been many events globally related to online piracy issues. For instance in Europe, this matter ignites serious political debates and a party that supports piracy has won seats in parliament. Many nations have different laws on online piracy, and this in itself makes combating online piracy an uphill task. 
Some measures include legislative measures such as SOPA and PIPA. SOPA is the acronym for Stop Online Piracy Act, which was introduced by Lamar R. Smith in US on October 26 2011. The bill had the view of giving the American law the ability to deal with online piracy. This was to be achieved through allowing courts to bar companies that deal with advertising and payment facilities from dealing with any websites that infringed (Sandoval 75). It would also allow the courts to bar search engines from linking with such sites and issue orders to stop any internet service provider from giving access to the websites. The bill did not stop there. It also addressed the streaming of materials that were copyrighted without authority. Such an offence attracted a jail sentence of not less than five years as per the bill’s proposal.
Proponents were especially pleased by the ability of the new legislation to protect intellectual property from foreign websites, which was previously not the case with flawed earlier laws. They saw this as a move to secure jobs of artists, and their respective supporting staff whereas the opponents of this legislation saw this move as a way of undermining innovation and free speech as an item posted on a single web page would warrantee a whole domain not to be accessible on the internet.
PIPA, on the other hand stands for Protect IP Act. Patrick Leahy a US senator on May 12 2011 with a view to strengthening the copyright laws to deal with copyright issues related with websites operated especially out of the US introduced this bill in US. This act was a redo of Combating Online infringement and Counterfeits Act, which had failed in 2010. In PIPA infringement was taken to mean distributing counterfeit goods or illegal copies. This bill like SOPA also recommended similar actions that are it required other entities to stop conducting business with infringing websites. This bill enjoyed the support from many companies in the US such as Motion Picture Association of America, National Cable, and Telecommunications Association among others as well as sharp protest. PIPA and SOPA were heavily protested against. For instance about 7000 websites conducted a service blackout protesting against the bills. Google had collected over seven million signatures being boycotts of