Getting my intellectual property stolen

Last week, I wrote an article on the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle and why people should be excited about it. And after all the research and work that went into it, I was glad to see what I wrote being generally well received. In fact, it was picked up by Google News and was displayed on the Google News homepage.

I was pretty excited about this at the time and, honestly, I still am.

However, as with most things, there was a downside. As the slight popularity of my article grew, so did the amount of sites online copying my article onto their site without my consent.

While most of these sites were nice enough to at least link to my article on the Indiana Daily Student homepage, many did not. In fact, a few took my name off the article altogether and slapped some advertisements next to it.

Basically, these latter asshats had stolen my article without telling me and were now making money off it.

Now, I’m a pretty easygoing person. And to be honest, the fact that I was getting so much press made up for most of my anger. But this really got to me, and it reminded me of the recent fights about SOPA and ACTA.

For those who have been living under some sort of Internet-proof rock, the Stop Online Piracy Act and Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement are both acts recently proposed as counter-measures to online content piracy. While the latter is an international affair, SOPA was strictly within the U.S.

These acts are supposed to combat the rise in piracy of “intellectual property,” such as illegally downloaded songs and episodes of “Breaking Bad.” And while trying to stop people from stealing might sound like a noble cause, these acts are far from ideal.

Both SOPA and ACTA have far-reaching consequences to Internet freedom. They allow the government to monitor a person’s online activity if they have even the slightest proof this person has been pirating content.

In fact, Internet service providers have the right to release any and all of your Internet history if they are given the slightest proof you’ve been involved in any sort of content piracy.

Basically, these acts spell out the end of Internet privacy and freedom.

Now, as someone who has had their intellectual property stolen, I can say the entire experience sucks. The people who did this to me didn’t just steal words on a page; they stole the hours of writing and research that went into those words.

But that does not give me or any government the right to disregard all personal freedoms. I absolutely think these people should pay for stealing my article, but they don’t deserve to have their rights stripped away.

If this had happened in the ’50s, and had these people stolen my article from a printed newspaper, would they have been blacklisted? Would their phones have been tapped and would they have been put under constant surveillance?

Thankfully, SOPA was cut down months ago. And while the European Union has refused to sign ACTA into agreement, acts like the Canada-EU Trade Agreement are back doors for many of ACTA’s frightening policies. It seems governments will stop at nothing to monitor their people unfairly.

I understand the Internet has changed things, and I understand it’s hard to redefine real-world laws in a computer-age. But that does not give any government the right to trample on the rights and freedoms of any human being.

­— kevsjack@indiana.edu