Internet Piracy and How to Stop It
Online piracy is a huge business. A recent study found that Web sites offering pirated digital content or counterfeit goods, like illicit movie downloads or bootleg software, record 53 billion hits per year. That robs the industries that create and sell intellectual products of hundreds of billions of dollars.
The problem is particularly hard to crack because the villains are often in faraway countries. Bad apples can be difficult to pin down in the sea of Web sites, and pirates can evade countervailing measures as easily as tweaking the name of a Web site.
Commendably, the Senate Judiciary Committee is trying to bolster the government’s power to enforce intellectual property protections. Last month, the committee approved the Protect IP Act, which creates new tools to disrupt illegal online commerce.
The bill is not perfect. Its definition of wrongdoing is broad and could be abused by companies seeking to use the law to quickly hinder Web sites. Some proposed remedies could also unintentionally reduce the safety of the Internet. Senator Ron Wyden put a hold on the bill over these issues, which, he argued, could infringe on the right to free speech. The legislation is, therefore, in limbo, but it should be fixed, not discarded.
The bill defines infringing Web sites as those that have “no significant use other than engaging in, enabling, or facilitating” the illegal copying or distribution of copyrighted material in “substantially complete form” — entire movies or songs, not just snippets.
If the offender can’t be found to answer the accusation (a likely occurrence given that most Web sites targeted will be overseas), the government or a private party can seek an injunction from a judge to compel advertising networks and payment systems like MasterCard or PayPal to stop doing business with the site.
The government — but not private parties — can use the injunction to compel Internet service providers to redirect traffic by not translating a Web address into the numerical language that computers understand. And they could force search engines to stop linking to them.
The broadness of the definition is particularly worrisome because private companies are given a right to take action under the bill. In one notorious case, a record label demanded that YouTube take down a home video of a toddler jiggling in the kitchen to a tune by Prince, claiming it violated copyright law. Allowing firms to go after a Web site that “facilitates” intellectual property theft might encourage that kind of overreaching — and allow the government to black out a site.
Some of the remedies are problematic. A group of Internet safety experts cautioned that the procedure to redirect Internet traffic from offending Web sites would mimic what hackers do when they take over a domain. If it occurred on a large enough scale it could impair efforts to enhance the safety of the domain name system.
This kind of blocking is unlikely to be very effective. Users could reach offending Web sites simply by writing the numerical I.P. address in the navigator box, rather than the URL. The Web sites could distribute free plug-ins to translate addresses into numbers automatically.
The bill before the Senate is an important step toward making piracy less profitable. But it shouldn’t pass as is. If protecting intellectual property is important, so is protecting the Internet from overzealous enforcement.
Housing for the Wounded
The federal government should not have to be sued into giving veterans with mental illnesses and brain injuries the care they need so they don’t end up living in the street. But it has come to that.
A lawsuit filed on Wednesday in Federal District Court in California seeks to force the Veterans Affairs Department to carry out a long-stalled plan to build permanent housing for disabled veterans on property it owns in Los Angeles, which is thought to have the nation’s largest concentration of homeless veterans.
The class-action suit, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California on behalf of disabled homeless veterans, makes a powerful claim of discrimination and dereliction of responsibility by the government.
It notes that the land, nearly 400 acres in a prime section of West Los Angeles, was deeded to the federal government in 1888 expressly for use as a home for disabled soldiers and sailors. Yet no such housing exists there now, though a large veterans hospital with short-term treatment beds occupies part of that land. A wide array of other features, like athletic fields, theater stages, hotel laundries, rental-car and bus storage, even oil wells and a dog park, has also been built on the sprawling campus — but no home for veterans with mental health problems.
The plaintiffs argue that the lack of housing discriminates against these veterans. The government is legally obliged to give them the same access to care as other sick veterans, the plaintiffs say, but effective care is impossible when the veterans have no homes.
Their argument is based on a well-established view among medical and social-service providers that the only sure way to give these vulnerable patients effective, consistent access to care is to house them first. Only later, with stability in their turbulent lives, can they benefit from mental health and addiction treatment, and job training and education to help them regain their independence.
No politician has ever failed to profess his or her allegiance to wounded warriors, and that includes President Obama; the veterans affairs secretary, Eric Shinseki; and California politicians like Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Henry Waxman. But there is a yawning gap between their earnest pledges and their continuing failure to provide a roof and beds for homeless veterans. This housing plan, long a cause of Bobby Shriver, a City Council member and former mayor of Santa Monica, would respond to a great need with an obvious solution.
The Los Angeles area has more than 8,000 homeless veterans, about 8 percent of the 107,000 or so across the country. It also has a huge government-owned property waiting to be built upon. It’s simple, really.
Citizens United’s Outrageous Offspring
Judge James Cacheris gave the impression last week that he was considering putting right what he got wrong when he ruled in May that corporations are free to make direct donations to federal candidates. That first judgment directly contravened last year’s Citizens United case and the Supreme Court’s earlier decision in Federal Election Commission v. Beaumont, which upholds a ban on corporate donations to candidates.
In reaffirming his ruling this week, Judge Cacheris appears not to have reconsidered his stance at all. He pays lip service to his duty as a lower court judge to apply Supreme Court precedent, but his reasoning and result brazenly flout it. The Justice Department must appeal this latest ruling.
Judge Cacheris fails to reckon with the Supreme Court’s explicit language in Citizens United, when it said that “Citizens United has not made direct contributions to candidates, and it has not suggested that the court” should overturn the ban on campaign contributions, as it did not.
Likewise, he rejects the precedent set by the Beaumont case, claiming that it doesn’t control his ruling either because it involves political spending by a nonprofit corporation. While Judge Cacheris extends the substantive holding of Citizens United, even more dangerously he mimics its model of extreme judicial activism. The conservative justices used and endorsed a dramatically unrestrained approach there. Refusing to be bound by precedent while pretending to respect it, this judge has outdone them.
Shadowing the Reclusive Painter of Light
Trackers of the artist Edward Hopper tirelessly pursue the true settings of his city tableaux, so tinged with Gotham loneliness. Was the night-shrouded “Drug Store” modeled from the Waverly Place shop in Greenwich Village currently occupied by a corner bookstore? The artist offered them little help. “What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house,” was his typically terse clue about his work.
City searchers would be wise to go 20 miles up the Hudson River to Nyack, a rustic backwater when Hopper grew up there in the 1880s. His home on North Broadway has been preserved as the Edward Hopper House Art Center.
Its current exhibit about his earliest roots provides hype-free relief from Manhattan galleries and a prophetic glimpse through the young artist’s eye. A simple sketch by the 9-year-old Hopper on a penny postcard shows the back view of a boy, alone and staring from a beach at an empty expanse of water. It is a calling card for all those loners who will come to haunt Hopper’s paintings, from midnight diners to dark movie palaces and wispy Cape Cod evenings.
A few years after Hopper’s death in 1967, I did my own searching at his Washington Square studio, where he painted alongside his wife, the artist Jo Nivison. It was special to stand under the skylight by his easel, amid sharp angles of shade and light that washed his paintings to near abstraction. It was rewarding to find a dusky staircase to the roof, where he painted sun-slashed cityscapes.
The stair runners had been covered with bright yellow paint. It turned out that his wife had eyesight problems late in life, and Hopper used brush and palette to shepherd her. Here was no new masterpiece, just a graphic detail from a quiet life — the sort that finds Hopper searchers wondering about that bookstore on Waverly Place.
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