In an Op-Ed in the New York Times this week, Scott Turow, President of the Authors Guild, contemplated the destiny of Shakespeare had he never been paid for his creative work. If there had been no incentive, the world’s greatest writer may not be the creative genius that we celebrate and study today.

At the Senate’s Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, February 16th, Turow testified on behalf of members of the Authors Guild, who have produced works of all genres and are recipients of literary awards and honors. According to Turow, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the “safe harbor” exemption offers an opportunity for copyright infringers to steal original work without legal penalty, specifically bringing attention to BTGuard.com, which enables users to block their identifiable IP number in order to anonymously download media from P2P sites like BitTorrent. In particular, I thought that Section 512 of Title II (on page 22 of the legislation) that enacts  “safe harbor” for online providers was particularly interesting since these providers are not considered liable if they do “not have actual knowledge that the material or activity using the material on the system or network is infringing.” In the meantime, however, these web providers could be profiting from the illegal downloads of music, books and other media under the pretense of not being aware of such acts of piracy.

Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who plans to introduce the new bill, addressed the stress that piracy puts on the economy, but also acknowledged the possible opposition in passing the legislation during this session. According to Leahy, critics fear that the bill would give “the Justice Department too much power to seize domain names without adequate oversight.”

Do you think that the DMCA safe harbors for online and Internet service providers or is it adequate to protect copyrighted works as is? Should this new bill be put before Congress?

Yes, seeing Pirate Bay slowly being shut down, part by part, may be sad, but the beauty of this is that little has changed in the site’s operation for the end user. You can still share and download files on The Pirate Bay, even if the tracker doesn’t work.

And, bringing it home to what this means in the context of Copyright, Commerce, and Culture:

If they succeed, it will be a lot harder for organizations such as RIAA and MPAA to sue the owners of such sites, while the actual process of file sharing wouldn’t change much for the end users.

For anyone who’s been following the Pirate Bay trial (and I know a few of us have been), it’s interesting to consider Pirate Bay tracker shutting down as a sign that lawsuits of this ilk may soon become more difficult for recording and movie industries to pursue. While the site’s original owners have been found guilty for facilitating the breach of copyright law (a verdict they plan to appeal), this case — and the news of the further success of decentralization in torrenting — offer up a way to understand the “future” of file-sharing by looking at its tumultuous past, all the way from the Napster ruling in the early 2000s.