Because there is clearly no greater threat to America than what people do in the privacy of their own homes on the Internet, Congress has taken it upon itself, in these last closing days of the year, to draft a bill called SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” reportedly designed to stop “foreign online criminals from stealing and selling America’s intellectual property and keeping the profits for themselves.”
It sounds terrifying. Foreign agents, dressed in little black outfits, crawling through the series of tubes, just waiting to pop through your computer screen and steal all of those priceless works of art you’ve been producing, your cat photos and your wealth of Star Trek fan fiction. And according to Lamar Alexander, who’s championing the bill, this threat of “foreign” infiltrators knocking off Hollywood and the record industry is omnipresent, and, America, you’re going to be next.
It’s a legitimate concern, I suppose, if that’s what SOPA was meant to actually prevent. Except, this being the government and all things being as they are, SOPA has actually turned out to be a bureaucratic mess that, if passed, could allow for the systematic and complete shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later censorship of any website suspected to be engaging in “illegal activity” or worse, whose independent, unaffiliated users are suspected of engaging in illegal activity.
Which, of course, means that the entire House of Representatives could be added to the list of SOPA offenders. Because when Lamar says “omnipresent,” you better believe he means omnipresent. As in, they’re downloading pirated content pretty much all the time.
YouHaveDownloaded is a treasure trove full of incriminating data on alleged BitTorrent pirates in organizations all across the world…Although we don’t plan to go on forever trawling the archives, we felt that there was at least one place that warranted further investigation – the U.S. House of Representatives. Since it’s the birthplace of the pending SOPA bill, we wondered how many of the employees there have engaged in unauthorized copying.
The answer is yet again unambiguous – they pirate a lot.
In total we found more than 800 IP-addresses assigned to the U.S. House of Representatives from where content has been shared on BitTorrent. After a closer inspection it quickly became clear the House isn’t just using it for legitimate downloads either, quite the opposite.
As it turns out, as they were happily drafting away at SOPA, members of the House, their staff and others using House of Reps servers were also happily downloading self-help books, job search manuals, entire seasons of Sons of Anarchy, illegal copies of Microsoft Windows 7 and, of course, pornography. Because what’s a little government action without a little government action?
Now obviously they are only downloading such materials for “research purposes.” After all, Congress doesn’t need porn. It has lobbyists for that. But it does beg the question, wouldn’t this all just be more easily taken care of if the RIAA and MPAA and their respective industries helped to develop faster and more engaging delivery services for online content rather than trying, inevitably unsuccessfully to punish people who fill in market gaps they’re willfully ignoring? Obviously, the current “pay twenty bucks to stick to the floor of a theater” system isn’t working out. Progress, people. Progress.
I suspect, until the end of time, or the pro golf retirement career of the last lobbyist, we’ll be trying to solve problems by giving them to Lamar Alexandar to handle. Which is really terrifying if you think about it. The man looks like the dad from Alf.