每日英語跟讀 Ep.927: In Culture of Access, a Frustrating Pursuit of Bootleggers 網路違法下載難以遏止

On June 30, 2010, Hana Beshara woke to a sharp rapping on the door of her condo in New Jersey.

2010年6月30日，哈娜．貝夏拉被她位於新澤西州的公寓大門急叩聲吵醒。

“ I’m thinking it’s, like, Amazon,” she said.

她說：「我以為那是亞馬遜（購物網站送貨）。」

It wasn’t a delivery. It was a team of armed federal agents who went through her belongings, confiscating her TV, computers and cellphones — anything with a hard drive.

不是送貨，而是一批武裝聯邦幹員。他們搜索她的全部私人物品，查扣她的電視、電腦與手機；任何配備硬碟的物品。

Ms. Beshara was a founder of a site called NinjaVideo, at the time one of the most popular places online to illegally stream and download TV shows and movies. At its peak, the site attracted 2.6 million visitors a day and had around 60,000 registered members. The site made watching illegal downloads almost as simple as flipping on the TV. Few who used it were surprised when it was shuttered.

貝夏拉是「忍者視訊」網站的創辦人之一。它當時是提供違法串流與下載電視節目、電影的最紅網站之一。鼎盛期間，它一天吸引260萬人次的網友，登記會員約6萬人。它使收看非法下載內容就和打開電視一樣簡單。當局將它關閉時，大多數人並不意外。

To the government, Ms. Beshara was a thief . The Motion Picture Association of America alerted the federal government to NinjaVideo and nine other movie-streaming sites, and they all went dark at the same time. The scale of the operation carried out by several agencies was meant to send a warning that the government wasn’t ignoring the freewheeling world of illegal online streaming and downloading.

在美國政府的眼中，貝夏拉是小偷。美國電影協會曾經提醒聯邦政府留意「忍者視訊」與另外9個電影串流網站。它們同時關閉。聯邦政府動員數個部會出擊所欲傳達的訊息是，絕不任由違法的網路串流及下載百無禁忌。

But it has proved very difficult to reverse a pervasive cultural nonchalance about what constitutes intellectual property theft on the web. File-sharing, most of it illegal, still amounts to nearly a quarter of all consumer Internet traffic, according to Cisco Systems’ Visual Networking Index. And a recent report from Tru Optik, a media analytics firm, said that nearly 10 billion movies, television shows and other files were downloaded globally in the second quarter of 2014. Tru Optik estimates that 6 percent of those downloads were legal.

然而事實證明，社會大眾對網路智財權侵犯行為的普遍漠視心理很難扭轉。根據思科公司公布的「視覺網絡指數」，違法居多的檔案分享仍占所有消費性網路流量的近1/4。媒體分析公司Tru Optik在最近發表的一項報告中指出，今年第2季，全球各地下載電影、電視節目及其他檔案的次數將近100億，其中約僅6%合法。

Congressional efforts in the United States, like a proposed Stop Online Piracy Act introduced in 2011, met with such strident objections from the technology industry that lawmakers backed down. The Copyright Alert System sends warnings when downloading of copyrighted content is detected . But last year, 1.3 million warnings were sent, a tiny fraction of what Tru Optik estimates to be 400 million illegal downloads in the United States each month.

美國國會議員曾於2011年提出「遏止網路盜版」草案，最後因為科技業界強烈反對而做罷。「版權警示系統」會在偵測到網友下載有版權的內容時發出警訊。然而去年，它總共只發出130萬次警訊，僅及Tru Optik所估計，全美每個月非法下載次數4億次的一小部分。

In 2012, the United States seized and shut down Megaupload, the popular digital locker site that allowed people to share files like movies and music anonymously, and arrested its owner, Kim Dotcom, along with other high-level executives. They have been indicted by the United States on charges related to copyright infringement, although many legal experts are not sure if a case will ever go to court.

熱門的數位鎖碼網站Megaupload使網友得以匿名分享電影與音樂檔案。2012年，美國政府將它查扣、關閉，同時逮捕它的所有人金．達康及數名高階主管。雖然許多法律專家不確定法院是否會受理，美國政府仍然以數項與侵犯版權有關的罪名起訴他們。

The motion picture group says it is not pursuing any new legislation to crack down on copyright infringement online, focusing instead on educating consumers about legal streaming options. The task, though, is “ at this point, never-ending,” said Michael D. Robinson, a group executive. He added, “It is difficult to compete with free.”

美國電影協會表示無意促使國會再立新法取締網路的版權侵害行為，而是希望能夠教育消費者瞭解並採用合法的串流選項。協會主管羅賓森表示，以目前來說，這是一項「無止盡的工作」，不過「很難與免費（內容）競爭」。

One study, by the American Assembly at Columbia University in New York, found that 70 percent of young adults had copied or downloaded music or video free and almost 30 percent got most of their collections that way. The pervasive cultural norm, especially among younger people, is that illegal downloading, at least when it involves material from big corporations, is no big deal.

紐約哥倫比亞大學泛美大會調查發現，70%的年輕成人曾經免費拷貝、下載音樂或影像，將近30%的人以這種方式取得他們大部分的收集品。普遍的文化規範（尤其是較年輕人們之間）是，至少涉及來自大企業的材料時，違法下載沒什麼大不了。

Andres Monroy-Hernandez, a social computing researcher at Microsoft Research, studied attitudes around ownership on collaborative, user-generated websites. He found that young Internet users became angry when peers used their works without permission, but didn’t see a problem in lifting images from shows or movies for use in their own work. “The farther removed you feel from the source,” he said, “the more likely you are to disregard the copyright and the intellectual property.”

孟洛伊-艾南德茲是微軟研究公司的社會電腦應用研究員，在研究人們對使用者集體創造網站的所有權態度之後發現，如果別人未經允許就使用他們的工作成果，年輕的網友會很不高興，為了自己而擅自取用節目或電影中的影像則沒有問題。他說：「你覺得與來源距離越遠，越可能無視於版權與智財權。」

There is another obstacle to stopping illegal downloads, said Andre Swanston, the chief executive of Tru Optik, the media analytics firm. People want access to everything, anytime, and there is little to stop them from having it. Even combining Netflix, Amazon Prime and other such services, “that is still less content available legally than illegally,” he said. “The popularity of piracy has nothing to do with cost — it is all about access.”

Tru Optik執行長史旺斯頓表示，遏止非法下載還有另一障礙。人們很想隨時接近並取得任何內容，而且很難阻止他們這麼做。他說，即使結合影片串流平台Netflix、亞馬遜的Prime與其他類似服務，「可以合法取得的內容還是少於違法」。他表示：「違法下載普遍與成本無關。取得才是關鍵。」

Peter Eckersley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit , said the law should shift its focus to making sure that copyright holders are paid for their work, rather than trying to stymie how people gain access to it. That kind of solution, he said, would create different priorities that go beyond chasing smalltime pirates like Ms. Beshara.

非營利機構電子前線基金會的艾克史雷表示，法律應該將重點自阻止人們取得版權內容，轉移至確保版權所有人得到報酬。他說，如此解決可使優先處理的事務有所不同，而不只是取締貝夏拉之類涉及違法下載的小咖。

After she spent 16 months in prison for conspiracy and criminal copyright infringement, Ms. Beshara still argued that the movie business was so big that skimming a little did not hurt anybody. Her site, she said, operated in a “gray area.”

貝夏拉因為陰謀與非法侵犯版權等罪名而入監16個月。她出獄後還是說，電影產業規模龐大，違法下載一小部分不會傷害任何人。她又說，她的網站在「灰色地帶」運作。

Recalling the “old days” of NinjaVideo, she said, “I would never take it back.”

她談到「忍者視訊」的「舊時光」時說：「我無怨無悔。」

Source article: https://paper.udn.com/udnpaper/POH0067/267314/web/