Interview in review: Third interview

My third interview was with Jason Walters, a graduate student in economics, who is doing his graduate paper on online piracy. Jason was very helpful in giving me angles of the subject that I never would have otherwise thought of and greatly enhanced my project. Here a just a few things I took from the interview.

1. Every online company doesn't work the same, business wise, and the SOPA and PIPA acts would have different effects depending on the website. 
2. The history of legislation on piracy has contradicted and undid previous precedents as technology has evolved. (AHRA vs. Millennium Copyright Act) 
3. Cloud computing would be greatly altered by SOPA and PIPA acts through storage facilities like Google and Amazon run, and these companies would be violating SOPA and PIPA if piracy occurred through them. The main example is the MegaUpload site that is a perfect example of what could happen. 
4. People that had legitimate files on MegaUpload lost all their files they had on the website when it was shut down. 
5. Google has come up with a solution, in their eyes, to the problem in the form of the OPEN act which basically allows you to argue and kind of have a judicial process about your storage facility website. The problem with this is many websites wouldn't have the capital to go through those types of litigation processes and so they won't continue to run the website. Consequently, Google has created a monopoly while crippling the industry.
6. Another problem the SOPA and PIPA acts run into is peer-to-peer network sites, which are inexpensive to set up and you don't have to pay for storage because every user is essentially storage so SOPA and PIPA would be ineffective in changing peer-to-peer networks because they can start up so easily. 
7. Peer-to-peer networks, however, have a greater incidence of malware so if SOPA and PIPA would have passed you would see a shift of file-hosting sites towards peer-to-peer networks and there would be a higher incidence of malware. The overall problem wouldn't have been solved, just redirected. 
8. With the black market, like online piracy is a part of, statistics are not concrete and empirical studies  involving online piracy usually have some sort of flaw. 
9. Movies and music are not the only industries that are affected by online piracy, software is another large industry affected. 
10. Piracy can have a positive effect, like in software.