Most of you have probably heard about the cyberattacks on Sony Entertainment and the controversy surrounding the release of the Sony film The Interview, about an assassination attempt on North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. But while the controversial film has sparked debate and thus become the center of media attention, the cyberattacks leaked a significant amount of information about Sony, from emails of top executives, to salary information, and the personal information (such as passport numbers, credit card numbers, bank information, etc.) of Sony employees. When any major corporation faces a security breach of this level, shocking information about the company’s involvement in activities which they intended to keep hidden from the public are to be expected. In Sony’s case the (literal) Goliath of the leaks was Sony along with 5 other major entertainment companies (Fox, Universal, Paramount, Disney and Warner Bros.), and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have been engaged in a yearlong campaign to strengthen piracy laws and to justify many of the proposals made in the 2011 Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) under current law.
Most of us probably remember SOPA as an act which aimed to prevent online piracy through the limit of internet freedoms. The act caused a significant amount of controversy, and was eventually defeated at least in part by a coordinated grassroots public campaign. Despite SOPA’s defeat, it’s not exactly surprising that entertainment companies such as Sony and Disney would try to bring it back in some form or another, given the extensive lobbying they engaged in when SOPA was originally being discussed in Congress.
Although most of the resistance against measures such as SOPA seem to be grounded on the principles of internet freedoms, the goals of companies such as Sony and Hollywood as a whole through the MPAA have more to do with copyright rights than in limiting internet freedoms.
Copyright laws are a subset of intellectual property rights which were created with the intention of providing a balance between distributing content for public use and for public enjoyment, while ensuring that creators get fair compensation for that distribution. Despite their initial purpose, over the last 150 years or so, intellectual property laws have evolved away from protecting the rights of creators and towards protecting the right of multi-million dollar corporations such as Sony, in the case of the entertainment industry. These laws limit access to information and knowledge to only those who can afford to pay for said access, thereby hurting the poorest and most vulnerable members of society. This lack of access to information is a significant barrier to people seeking to change their lives.
In addition to adversely affecting the poorest people in society, intellectual property rights when applied to areas such as scientific research hurt progress by limiting access to previous knowledge. Innovation in any field or area requires previous work in that area to be readily available to those looking to innovate. By limiting this knowledge to a select group we limit the pool of people with the ability to innovate and thus, hamper human progress as a whole.
The evolution of intellectual property rights towards serving corporate interests does not seem to be slowing down. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that human genes could not be patented after a pharmaceutical company attempted to patent two isolated genes which have been linked to high risk of breast cancer for women. Had the company been successful in patenting the genes, they would have held the sole rights to testing for the genes and could have legally refused to test for the genes in anyone who was not able to pay for them. Although the Supreme Court ruled against this measure, the case paints a fair picture of how far intellectual property rights have evolved towards corporate interests. Already they can be used to patent human genes and impede people’s access to potentially life-saving healthcare.
Efforts have been made to curb the strengthening of these laws, such as the massive resistance against SOPA in 2011 and finding alternative ways to distribute content. The most notable of which is Creative Commons, a license which can be used alongside existing copyright laws to make content part of the public domain while still allowing the creator to control certain aspects of how that content is used. But alternative licensing practices cannot fix the problems of a legal framework which within its current framework hampers creativity and hurts progress. Revising copyright laws and an overhaul of the legal framework which dictate intellectual property rights are essential to fixing a system that currently exists to serve corporate interests. Of course, first we have to stop Sony, Disney & co. from taking us back to 2011.
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