Banning websites is a crude way to stop piracy

A series of hacker attacks on Indian websites by the infamous Anonymous collective have sparked intense debate around the issue of online piracy and Internet censorship. Over the last few weeks, Anonymous has attacked Indian government websites including that of the ruling Congress party and the Supreme Court, the Reliance Big Cinema website, the Reliance DNS Servers, and most recently the BJP website.

The issue? Several film makers including “3” (The makers of the Kolaveri Di song) convinced courts to impose a John Doe order on file sharing websites and Internet Service Providers, resulting in the blocking of entire file sharing websites including popular video sharing site Vimeo, which also have a lot of legitimate content uploaded on them by users. Many Indian Internet users are outraged, saying that the arbitrary blocking of these sites violates world accepted copyright licenses such as Creative Commons, and is nothing short of crude censorship. ( Read more )

It is certainly true that the blocking of entire websites is an extremely crude attempt to solve a complex problem - like chopping off an arm to treat a finger. And as this article on Firstpost states , it sets a dangerous precedent that could in all probability, “kill the Internet”. India in particular with its policy of ‘ban it if you can’t control it’ seems to be well down this path.

But with copyright and intellectual property (like it or not) being a serious issue, what do governments do when copyright owners approach them and ask them to help stop online piracy? The Business Standard   has asked two experts to tackle the issue in a debate, which throws up some interesting points. The first being that India has a strong intellectual property rights regime that includes the Indian Copyright Act 1957, The Trademark Act 1999 and the Patent Act, under which it is bound to act to protect intellectual property.

But on the hand there is the ubiquitous nature of the Internet. Governments and courts may be able to issue directives to ban only certain types of content from file sharing sites, but how does one implement such an order? The minute you ban one link, ten mirrors pop up to replace it. And the collective intelligence of a determined Internet means that if it wants to share a file, that file will get shared.

Both participants in the Business Standard debate , Prashant Reddy, a curator at SpicyIP.com and Pavan Duggal who is a cyberlaw expert, are in agreement that a blanket John Doe order won’t get anyone anywhere.

Reddy gives an interesting history of the John Doe order, which was apparently used to stop vendors from selling unauthorized memorabilia outside a Billy Joel concert venue. In India, he says, the order was first used against cable operators by companies like ESPN (to stop them broadcasting sports events that only ESPN had the rights to) and producers such as Reliance Big Entertainment (to stop cable channels from airing newly released films).  This same order was then used to regulate the Internet. He argues that this extrapolation of the law to cover the Internet and cable companies is tenuous at best, and is by no means a solution.

Duggal on the other hand argues that governments cannot sit idle while intellectual property rights are flagrantly violated by some users on Internet file sharing sites. He says that more innovative and holistic approaches are needed to deal with the issue, adding that that blocking Internet sites is not a solution. “Governments across the world have to look at more pragmatic ways of dealing with copyright infringements and piracy on such websites, while ensuring that at no time should the access to legitimate content should be blocked”, he says.

Duggal is however unable, or simply does not offer a solution.

Perhaps what the entire issue is highlighting, is the redundancy of existing copyright laws. Maybe they need to be amended to include Internet sharing, or should draw inspiration from creative commons type of licenses. Or perhaps we need to look at the entire issue of intellectual property as a concept altogether.

In an earlier Firstpost debate, our Editor, R. Jagannathan said, “No movie or book or intellectual property ever lost money just because a pirated version was available – either on the streets or on the Internet. What burns the IPR owners up is the possibility that someone else may be making money from their work, or that they could be making more if only the pirates were prevented from robbing their content. However, what they fail to consider is the possibility that it may be the pirate who is giving them the visibility that high pricing would not. Piracy is almost always the market’s response to overpricing or non-availability of a product.”

Thoughts?