In 2012 a prominent issue arose that deals with the convergence of social media with copyright infringement monitoring systems.(Reisinger, 2012) The growing interest in this topic can be largely attributed to the recent anti-piracy bills: the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act. Various officials from all over the world have expressed an interest in forcing social networks to install and utilize monitoring systems to determine if users are illegally obtaining copyrighted material. For example, if implemented, these filters could prevent the illegal sharing of music over social networking platforms. The convergence of search engines and social networks could make this process even easier. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing have begun to merge with social media platforms to link Internet searches to your social networking sites such as Facebook.(Houck, 2012) This poses an even greater threat to users since their Internet searches can be monitored via their social networks.
