Software piracy and copyright infringement is a huge problem for the entertainment industry. Since April 2011, three bills and one international trade agreement have been introduced as attempts to curb digital copyright infringement. None of the four attempts have been passed by Congress, because all four would have granted corporations and the government the ability to gather the private information of anybody who uses services like Google and Facebook.

The four attempts at stopping Internet piracy were: The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and the most recent attempt, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). All four were vague enough to grant sweeping powers to both the government and corporations that would effectively censor the Internet.

This is not the right approach to battling piracy and digital crime.

The most recent bill, CISPA, was passed by the House of Representatives on April 18. CISPA would allow for corporations and the government to freely share all the private information they have with each other in the name of battling the theft of intellectual property. When it reached the Senate, the members decided to change the bill; the Senate is drafting its own version of the bill, according to the Huffington Post.

“Information sharing is a key component of cybersecurity legislation, but the Senate will not take up CISPA,” Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, told the Huffington Post.

Even though Congress refuses to kill CISPA, the White House has explicitly stated it will issue a veto against CISPA if it passes.

“We have long said that information sharing improvements are essential to effective legislation, but they must include proper privacy and civil liberties protections, reinforce the appropriate roles of civilian and intelligence agencies and include targeted liability protections,” the official White House statement released April 16 said.

If the government were able to access all the private information a corporation possesses about a person, or vice-versa, it would mean that person could easily be tracked throughout his or her life as long as they stay in a country with a cell phone network.

Even if the person in question obeys the law throughout his or her life, there is no guarantee the information will not be misused or abused. While identity theft is the biggest issue, corporations could discriminate against this person in job applications, interest rates, mortgages or car loans, just to name a few potential abuses.

Even with these problems and the ones the White House addressed, the U.S. still signed ACTA in 2011, alongside Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea. The international trade agreement, if ratified by the countries that signed it, pressures Internet service providers to enforce suspected copyright infringement among their customers, increases civil and criminal penalties for copyright violations, requires legal ramifications for people circumnavigating copyright protection technologies and it violates users’ privacy and due process rights, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

During the ACTA negotiations, protesters took to the streets all over the world. The Christian Science Monitor reported in 2011 that protests sprung up in Germany, France, the United Kingdom and other European nations in an attempt to convince the European Union to abandon support for the agreement.

The protests seemed to have a hand in convincing Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Latvia to pull their support for ACTA. Germany’s Justice Minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, refused to sign the treaty until her colleagues in the European Commission and the European Parliament considered all the legal ramifications of ratifying ACTA.

Combating piracy does not have to mean censoring the Internet. This is not merely a domestic issue, but an international one that needs to be handled neutrally so as to curb piracy while keeping the enforcers from having too much power.

In fact, it could be too daunting of a task to prevent piracy through law; a more effective method would involve making content more available to users while convincing those same users that piracy is not a victimless crime.