What does the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) mean to you, if you’re in public relations? Nothing good. For a business increasingly dependent on social media, whose arsenal has always relied upon viral, user-shared content, and whose aim is to get everyone talking about their clients, SOPA poses a significant threat.
If it is somehow possible that you have not yet read about SOPA – an unlikely scenario, given that reading this blog makes you an able consumer of online content, and the SOPA debate has dominated the web for the last several weeks – the proposed legislation is available here. Put simply, SOPA would allow for court orders to be issued against websites accused of piracy or other illegal activities, potentially requiring (among other things) that ad networks halt their business with said sites, search engines de-link said sites, payment processors cease accepting payments for said sites, and more. In essence, a site accused of facilitating piracy can immediately lose all access to business-vital functions such as site discovery, content sale, and ad revenue.
Everyone whose livelihood is rooted in the gaming industry can likely agree that piracy is terrible and its practitioners should be punched in the head. Trying to solve the issue with SOPA, however, opens the door to entirely new problems, many of which may disrupt your life as a PR professional (or a company that uses PR to promote itself). Continue reading SOPA – PR Poison?