(Spencer J Eggers/The Daily Campus)

Technology companies and consumers have been lobbying against online piracy for weeks. However, it wasn’t brought to the majority of American’s attention until Wikipedia announced its 24-hour blackout on Jan. 18, just days before SOPA and PIPA were set to be debated in Senate.

Thousands of websites joined Wikipedia during that 24-hour period, including Google, to protest the bill. With more than 10 million people filling out online petitions according to Fight for the Future, several members of Congress publicly withdrew their support for the bill.

Because of the success of the largest online protest, lawmakers are now trying to find an alternative to stopping online piracy. Expert in intellectual property Xuan-Thao Nguyen, who is also a professor in SMU’s Dedman School of Law, believes that this is a battle between old and new media.

“At the bottom of it, it’s about libel,” Nguyen said. “You saw it before in the music industry. Now, you see it in a different kind of content such as movies and TV shows.”

The solution for music was iTunes, which was purely technological according to Nguyen. The solution for movies and TV shows, however, will need to be a legal and technological combination.

“Copyright on the Internet has expanded enormously,” she said. “But, digital content has no borders.”

With the digital world gaining traction and more people online, depriving people access to online content is daunting.

“Too many people say this [SOPA and PIPA] is a big surprise, but I think it’s merely that people are realizing that the old world and new world are so interconnected,” Nguyen said. “You can’t live a day without online access. I don’t know how we would function without it.”

Nguyen said that there needs to be balance between what old media wants and how search engines currently operate.

“Old media wants intellectual property to be protected but at the same time Google, YouTube and Facebook want the public to come to their websites,” she said. “They don’t want old media to hinder them from exercising their business model.”

But what many websites have failed to incorporate into their business model is the selling of advertisements.

“Selling advertisements increases traffic to the site,” Nguyen said. “This is not new, many companies have figured this out.”

From a legal standpoint, Nguyen questions the effectiveness of the bill because it does not provide for private cause of action.

Unlike the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which allowed for the copyright holder to present the case in court, cases under SOPA only allows for the U.S. attorney general to initiate action.

In section 102 of the bill (H.R.3261) it states, “Upon commencing an action under this subjection, the Attorney General shall send a notice of the alleged violation and intent to proceed under this section to the registrant of the domain name of the Internet site…to the owner or operator of the Internet site…or, in any other such form as the court may provide, including as may be required by rule 4(f) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.”

Therefore, only the attorney general can protect and prevent customers from foreign infringement.

“This has to be initiated by the U.S. justice department,” Nguyen said. “In the existing law, the copyright holder themselves contacts sites such as eBay. Now, copyright holders are relying on the government — it doesn’t say that Time Warner can bring it against the court. It clearly says the attorney general.”

According to Nguyen, government does not have the resources to uphold this bill.

“I’m curious if they are going to have a budget to appropriate money for the attorney general office to do this,” she said. “Where will the government get the money? Where are the human resources going to come from?”

As Nguyen sees it, the movie industry should take foreign infringement as an honor.

“If I was in the movie industry, I’d be pretty happy that I have an audience,” she said. “I would exploit it and make money in a different way.”

The solution, according to Nguyen, would incorporate technology to the company’s current business model.

“You want to find a balance that encourages people to create good content that other people want to see,” she said.”But, at the same time, you want to support the industries. You don’t want a system that doesn’t have any creative content to watch.”