CISPA vs. The Pirate Bay: who will win the future of information sharing?selfnews Post Some of the players in this epic include: Internet moguls, governments around the world, media empires, military intelligence, and the ever-ominous power of the people. The question to be answered is simple: Can Internet users freely share files on the Internet? How you respond to it will decidedly affect the future of not just music, but every industry in the world. A Brief History of Pirates Napster hit the scene and June 1999 and changed the game in a major way. For the first time, a centralized, unstructured file-sharing system was widely being used, and an MP3 of almost any song you could ask for was available for free. The site was brought down in a lawsuit with AM Records in July 2001[1]. Since that time, many P2P networks have come and gone. Some of the more notable ones being: Morpheus, Kazaa, Limewire, BitTorrent, FrostWire, and MegaUpload. Today, the US Legal Armada has raised its sails with navigates set for siege on the Pirate Bay, a Swedish site that is currently providing downloads to over 4 million unique IPs around the world each month (in other words, it now has more participants than the Chicago Tribune does readers [2]). Enter CISPA CISPA stands for the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. It is a bill which passed the House of Representatives on April 26th, 2012, and is currently being debated in the Senate [3]. It gives military intelligence organizations such as the NSA and CIA authority to shut down any site they deem to be a cyber threat, which it defines as follows: Information in the possession of an element of the intelligence community directly pertaining to a vulnerability of, or threat to, a system or network of a government or private entity, including information pertaining to the protection of a system or network from either efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy such system or network; or theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information [3]. In other words, if this bill passes, you can say goodbye to the Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks within 6 months WikiLeaks, in the name of domestic security; the Pirate Bay in the name of stopping piracy. But before we just accept that prerogative, lets explore what piracy really is. What does Piracymean, exactly? When you go to TBP for example, you are not viewing stolen music, as some would lead you to believe. Rather, you are viewing legally purchased music that someone is simply offering to let you copy and paste onto your hard drive. Unlike physical theft, no one is actually losing anything. It is analogous to walking into a grocery store, magically cloning a container of blueberries, and simply taking the clone with you, but leaving the original container where you found it. Nothing actually gets taken from anyone. Everyones Big Concern: the Livelihood of the Artist In my experience, the people who are against file sharing dont make very complete objections to the premises on which file sharing is based. Rather, they eventually all cut to the same point how can artists support themselves when people have the option of downloading their music for free? Concern over this issue forgets to consider two things: Case study: Can we do away with record sales completely? As convincing as I find this logic, some people just have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that an artist can make decent money off of YouTube and concerts alone.With those people in mind, I thought it might be worth considering a group of artists who have forfeited record sales altogether. Due to their frequent use of copyrighted samples, many electronic music artists are actually not allowed to sell records. Even the big names like Kaskade and Pretty Lights release all of their music for free download off their blogs. They generate revenue from ad sponsorship on free streaming sites, and perform at some of the biggest concerts on the planet. Rather than attempting to hoard and protect their music, they disseminate it as widely as possible. Kaskade, for example, regularly throws up links for free downloads and streaming to his more than 253,000 Twitter followers. Hows that for embracing the idea of free music? The Pirate Bay vs. CISPA: do we really have to choose? Now, ordinarily Im not one for taking sides in a conflict as I feel it usually represents some sort of false dichotomy (youre either behind our military, or youre with the terrorists!). This situation is one exception. The Pirate Bay and CISPA cannot and will not coexist peacefully, as the main directive of CISPA is to take TPB down. Its going to be one or the other, so as far as I can tell, you might as well weigh in. If you believe in free music on our planet, raise awareness. Send this article or others like it to your friends and family. Write about it on your own blog, Facebook, or Twitter. Youre not going to get the chance to vote on it yourself, but you can affect change by spreading understanding of the forces and ideas at work. CISPA is the third bill of its kind to be proposed in the last year alone. SOPA and PIPA have failed already, yet the proposals keep coming. Even if CISPA fails, it wont be the last. Big Media and government are going to keep working until they either get their way, or the world stands up to them. And they may succeed. They may eventually pass a bill and take down the Pirate Bay. In the words of Medgar Evers, however,You can kill a man, but you cant kill an idea. Because for every site they take down, three will appear to replace it. Free sharing is not about any one site or any one person. Its an idea the idea that we are free to share with the world, and create artistic abundance! It is not the end of music it is the end of the music empire. And that, in my humble opinion, is not something to lament. Sources: 