Stop Piracy Now > Philosophy

The Stop Piracy Now Philosophy

"If everything that people produce will be stolen with
impunity, most people will just stop producing.
We need to stop piracy, now."

Digital technology has made copying things so easy that literally millions of people do it all the time. And because "everybody’s doing it," nobody seems to think copying songs, software and ideas is a big deal anymore.

We Seek
"Digital Parity"

To the contrary, piracy is a big deal. Taken to its logical conclusion, the unfettered growth of piracy would lead to the death of creative activity. Simply put, if everything that people produce will be stolen with impunity, most people will just stop producing. That statement has always been true, but the rise of the electronic age has created a crisis of mass-produced, mass-scale theft which makes this a whole new ballgame that threatens to obliterate intellectual property rights and to steadily grind creative activity to a halt.

Punish Online Crimes The
Same As Offline Crimes

SPN was founded by individuals from a small mom-and-pop business, MetroGuide.com, Inc., ("MetroGuide") who found themselves the victims of large-scale and systematic infringement of literally tens of thousands of pages of their copyrighted material. MetroGuide fought back, using the legal system to transfer the ownership of the websites that had obtained "link equity" by unlawfully using content. Part of the money made from those websites are now helping fund our efforts to stop piracy, now.

Our Mission

SPN's mission is to help educate people about, raise awareness of, and when possible, do battle with all forms of electronic piracy. We will continue to faithfully operate a series of websites disgorged from copyright infringers and donate a portion of the profits from those websites to other organizations with similar missions.

The SPN Platform

SPN’s editorial board has adopted certain policy positions shown in the list below. These positions are subject to change without notice.

1. "Put the Pirates in the Pokey."© Only aggressive government intervention can solve the problem of electronic piracy, and more action is needed immediately. Jail time for pirates is the only way to wake people up. There needs to be parity between the punishment for online crimes and offline crimes.
1. Too many of the current legislative initiatives talk about "education." It's time to start locking people up, as the criminals they are.
2. H.R. 2929, the Safeguard Against Privacy Invasions Act (SPI) should be passed immediately, but Congress still needs to go further to protect publishers as well as consumers from spyware.
3. The No Electronic Theft (NET) act of 1997 needs to be enforced. In SPN's home district, South Florida, our U.S. Attorney needs to get off his rear end and start enforcing the law.
4. E-mail spam should be banned, similar to the banning of junk faxes. Providing false contact and/or routing information in an e-mail should be treated as mail fraud.
5. The United States government needs to get serious about sanctioning countries, such as China, Ukraine and Singapore, that engage in large-scale software and music piracy with impunity.
6. Copyright "infringement" is more than a civil matter and needs to be recognized as a criminal act of theft. It also needs to be taken seriously by law enforcement agencies.
7. The FCC is asleep at the helm and needs wake up and start prosecuting spectrum piracy by illegal radio broadcasters.
8. Search engine results need to be regulated. A common asset, the integrity of the Internet, is being steadily undermined by affiliate program spam.
2. An Internet domain that is found with significant amounts of stolen content, where the presence of that content has attracted significant link equity, should be disgorged.
3. Consumers should be afforded a reasonable expectation of privacy when lawfully surfing the Internet, but copyright holders have a legitimate interest in piercing that privacy in the pursuit of piracy.
4. Although SPN believes that the RIAA could handle the situation differently, they are well within their rights to sue individuals for swapping songs; we wish them success.
5. Pop-over spyware companies like Gator and WhenU are engaged in what many condemn as blatant copyright infringement, pure and simple. The specific infringement is the retransmission of the copyright holder's text content back to the spyware servers, which is then used in an unauthorized manner to deliver the contextual ads.
6. The running of a peer-to-peer service that is engaged in wholesale content theft should be treated as a criminal act. Hiding on a lump of sand barely above the waterline in the Pacific like Tuvalu shouldn't keep Interpol from slapping on the cuffs.

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Stop Piracy Now > Philosophy