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Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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It’s time for the PR profession to join the opposition to SOPA and PIPA

Reddit WarriorEarlier today, U.S. House of Representatives Majority Leader Eric Cantor shelved the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), leading many to think the legislation is dead. It can, however, be ressurrected at any time. Meanwhile, its Senate counterpart, PIPA, is still very much alive even as support for it declines.

Despite the fact that the House won’t vote on the bill, Wikipedia and Reddit are among those that plan to go ahead with site blackouts on Wednesday, January 18, designed to raise awareness of the damage SOPA and PIPA could do.

I haven’t heard of a single public relations agency or association planning to join the blackout or even take a stand on SOPA. The profession should take a stand and add its voice to the rising chorus of opposition.

That’s a tall order since the supporters of the legislation, from large media empires to small copyright owners, are PR clients. If I represented a client supporting SOPA, I certainly wouldn’t risk the engagement by publicizing my opposition on my website.

The profession as a whole, though, has to recognize that these bills pose a threat to PR’s ability to serve its clients interests in the increasingly vital online world.

How would SOPA affect communicators’ use of the web?

Sharing and social sites

Long gone are the days when companies host videos and other media on their own servers. YouTube is the de facto location for videos, Flickr for photos, Slideshare for presentations. Companies are also using links to Facebook in advertising and marketing instead of their own websites.

SOPA threatens all that content, as long as it resides on a .com, .org or .net domain. All it takes is for a user to upload a video, a photo or a presentation that violates someone’s copyright—even if it’s someone singing a cover of a song at a party—and under SOPA, Internet service providers could be ordered to block the domain name. When YouTube goes dark, so will the links embedded on your own site and any others that lead to your YouTube videos. Ditto photos on phot-sharing sites and presentations on sites like Slideshare and Scribd.

Let’s take it one step farther. Imagine launching a contest for your fans to submit content (like Doritos does for its Super Bowl commercial). And suppose one of those videos includes a snippet of a song used innocently and that you don’t recognize as copyright-protected. Your client’s own site should be blocked as a result.

The legislation includes no due process at all; there is virtually no appeal process for an organization whose site is blocked.

Aggregation and curation sites—like Delicious and Storify—could also be affected. If I add an item to one of my Storify stories, for example, and don’t realize it contains an infringing bit of content, that could be enough to lead to a complete block of the site’s domain.

Search engine optimization

Your clients have probably spent a fair amount of time and money optimizing for search. Some of that expenditure may be your agency’s own billable time. Under SOPA, however, sites like Google would be required to alter their search results to exclude non-US websites that host offending content. The investment those clients made will vanish if their sites no longer appear on search engine results pages.

Advertising

Ad services like Google AdSense would be required to reject ads or payment from the sites that host offending content, which could affect your clients’ strategies for generating income.

Security

Security experts have been casting about for some time for a better method of securing domain names. This year, the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) solution is set to launch. SOPA threatens it. Writing for Volokh Conspiracy, Stewart Baker explained the problem in plain English:

SOPA envisions the AG telling ISPs to block the address of http://www.piracy.com. So the browsers get no information about http://www.piracy.com from the ISP’s DNS server. Faced with silence from that server, the browser will go into fraud-prevention mode, casting about to find another DNS server that can give it the address. Eventually, it will find a server in, say, Canada. Free from the Attorney’ General’s jurisdiction, the server will provide a signed address for piracy.com, and the browser will take its user to the authenticated site.

That’s what the browser should do if it’s dealing with a hijacked DNS server. But browser code can’t tell the Attorney General from a hijacker, so it will end up treating them both the same. And from the AG’s point of view, the browser’s efforts to find an authoritative DNS server will look like a deliberate effort to evade his blocking order.

Not only does this undermine the launch of DNSSEC, it puts your clients at risk for legal action they didn’t do anything to deserve.

Payments

If your client accepts online payments via their websites using PayPal or other services, those payments could stop. PayPal and its peers could be required to shut down the accounts of non-US websites that host offending content.

Non-US domains

Let’s say you have a client in Canada whose Canadian site is deemed to host content that violates copyright. Since SOPA blocks only “domestic Internet protocol addresses,” you’d think the Canadian site that serves Canadians would be safe. However, IP addresses are allocated by regional, not national, organizations. The American Registry for Internet Names (ARIN) is the service in the U.S., but its regional territory also covers Canada and 20 countries in the Caribbean. Since SOPA sees all IP addresses issued by ARIN as domestic, the Canadian site would be blocked.

Finding talent

PR pracitioners are finding greater uses of voiceover talent for everything from Podcasts to videos. Voice casting sites host clips from voice talent. Sometimes these individuals read copyrighted works, which would lead to an order for ISPs to block access to the domain. These sites have led to voice talent from rural areas getting work, but according to one of these sites—Voice123—the result would be to “drive work back to cities and put thousands out of work.” It would also limit the range of talent to which you have access.

The voice talent issue is also an example of the scorched-earth approach SOPA takes. It would be only a matter of time before other legitimate content that communicators need vanishes from the net.

But wait. Isn’t piracy bad?

SOPA and PIPA are the result of lobbying by entertainment companies seeking a remedy to piracy of their content. None of those opposing the legislation believe piracy is acceptable, only that the proposed remedies cause far more damage than they stop.

Opposition is widespread. The list of Internet luminaries speaking out against SOPA is huge and reads like a Who’s Who of technology leadership. Eighty-three of the net’s most prominent inventors, founders and engineers signed an open letter to Congress outlining the bills’ flaws. The American Civil Liberties Union is among those with a page making it easy for visitors to speak out against the bill to their representatives, noting that “SOPA eliminates the concept of sites ‘dedicated to infringing activity’ and enables law enforcement to target all sites that contain some infringing content, no matter how trivial.”

The White House announced it would veto the act. Even one of PIPA’s sponsors announced he’d vote against it, although he’d continue co-sponsoring the bill in order to facilitate discussion.

The retreat from the bills is based on the widespread opposition that led tens of thousands of people to shift their domains from GoDaddy, which flip-flopped on its support of SOPA in the wake of the defections. Reddit’s campaign against one legislator led Rep. Paul Ryan to voice his own opposition to the bill.

Besides, these pieces of legislation won’t actually stop piracy.

The right side of history

SOPA may be shelved and PIPa may be bound for a similar fate, but that doesn’t meant the forces behind the legislation won’t be back to try again. It’s in our own interest as communicators to take a stand against any legislation that threatens the freedom of expression on the Net. As Google’s Sergey Brin put it, “I am shocked that our lawmakers would contemplate such measures that would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world,” speaking of measures taken by powers like China and Iran to prevent access to content they don’t want people to see.

The consequences to our ability to do our jobs as communicators and counselors is at risk from these bills and those that will replace them. It’s time for our profession to unite in opposing these kinds of measures and to advocate for approaches to addressing piracy that might actually work.

 

Comments
  • 1.A worthwhile endeavor, indeed, Shel. And certainly an issue PRSA has been closely monitoring. So where do we go from here?

    Given how many Internet companies are already behind a well organized effort to stop the progress of both SOPA and PIPA, I'm not sure it makes sense for the PR profession to take its own, individual stand against these two proposed bills; rather, I would propose we would have greater success getting behind similar efforts of allied industries or joining forces with our brethren in marketing and advertising to make our case.

    In other words, let's take the strength in numbers approach.

    Keith Trivitt
    Associate Director
    Public Relations Society of America

    Keith Trivitt | January 2012

  • 2.Agree!

    Thanks, Shel, for opening my eyes. While I have been reading about SOPA, your explanation helped me understand the danger of it even more.

    Charles Pizzo | January 2012 | New Orleans, Louisiana USA

  • 3.Very much what i have in mind, Keith! I would see organizations in PR signing on to existing efforts. The list of organizations opposing can include associations and any agencies comfortable with voicing their solidarity. The only dedicated effort is identifying the process of adding a communications category to the list (http://www.cdt.org/report/list-organizations-and-individuals-opposing-sopa) and creating awareness in the profession that the opportunity exists and the process to follow.

    Shel Holtz | January 2012

  • 4.Shel, as you may have seen, the Public Relations Society of America officially came out against SOPA and PIPA. Below is the statement we issued Jan. 18 in opposition of the bills:

    "We respect the protection of a company’s or individual’s intellectual property rights, while also firmly believing in the freedom of expression and the continuation of an open and unrestricted Internet. As such, we oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). It is the opinion of PRSA that SOPA and PIPA, as currently written, overreach, threatening the innovation and development of the Internet.

    Consumers should have access to legitimate content. Copyright owners should have practical means of protecting their works that also consider and serve the public interest. And technology companies should be free from undue legal or regulatory burdens.

    We take today’s news that members of Congress wish to revise both bills as a hopeful sign of a renewed willingness to compromise in a way that balances the competing interests of all parties.

    It is our hope that lawmakers will not impede the growth of the Internet or the public’s access to online content by passing laws that aim to censor and unnecessarily target content providers and search engines in an arbitrary and capricious manner."

    Keith Trivitt
    Associate Director
    Public Relations Society of America

    Keith Trivitt | January 2012

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