How will SOPA and PIPA affect your SEO strategy?
- 18
- Jan
SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is a bill that was introduced to the House of Representatives in October. If passed, the bill would give U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders greater power to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. While PIPA (“Protect Intellectual Property Act”) is the Senate’s version of SOPA, which is a bill that calls for enhancing enforcement against “rogue websites operated and registered overseas” and defines infringement as the distribution of illegal copies, counterfeit goods or anti-digital rights management technology.
This may seem like good new for the music or entertainment industry since they’ve been log plagued by the effects of online piracy, but in actual fact, these bills will most probably do more harm than good.
If you read attentively the contents of SOPA you will immediately see the danger most sites will be in and that these measures won’t even affect that much the Pirates.
Your Website Could Unfairly Get Shut Down/Blacklisted:
If the government or the owner of copyrighted material identifies your website as hosting copyrighted material and falling guilty of copyright infringement.
The bill also holds for some very rough penalties for websites that stream copyrighted content without authorization: up to 5 years in prison!
Its Potential Harm to Big Tech Companies Will Also Affect Smaller Businesses.
Because on big sites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube (etc.) are posted daily millions of links from users, but under the bill, these sites would literally be unable to function, as the amount of copyright infringing content that gets posted would be completely beyond their control. So this will also affect smaller businesses that owe most of their popularity and recognition on the real market to these big sites!
So, what is the Government doing with these two bills? Isn’t this a form of masked censure and control?
We accuse China for its harsh censure and we condemn the Communism for the way it tried to control society yet we still proclaim to be a democracy and a country where free will is guaranteed and defended. Where has the concepts of democracy and freedom gone to?
If these two bills pass we will create a precedent for other anti-democratic measures to be put in practice under the so well hidden motivation of protecting the American values and America’s innovative and creative products.
And now imagine that your business website can be affected.Maybe you have posted pictures – and you don’t own them.Also, imagine all your SEO efforts – based on social media, disappearing in one day.
With the recent Google update, Panda – all of the business websites based on shady grounds have been demoted.This made room for better websites to get to the first page, but it also rearranged the SEO priorities of any specialist.
A new earthquake comes today with SOPA.Yes, it will protect our work from more copyright infringement.But not all of this is a good thing.
I can see a very thin line between our protection and censorship.If the government has the right to block any website and IP, what will stop them going a bit further and eradicating free speech?
Also, think that most SEO strategies are based on social media.If Facebook, Twitter and Youtube will go down, what would be the next step?
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