So I just arrived back in Toronto a few days ago after having spent the past ten days in Los Angeles, California. I went on an all expenses paid business trip to the City of Angels because a website I am working as a freelance PR and Marketing Coordinator on called
Girlzporn.com, which is a product of
Inlyte Corp, was nominated for Specialty/Alternative Website of the Year by
XBIZ. The website has only been in the swing of things since September 2011, so this was kind of a big deal for us publicity wise.
All of the industry panels and meetings took place at the
Sofitel Hotel downtown Los Angeles. I learned so much about the world of e-commerce and I didn't realize how smart and business savvy the people we were going to meet with would be. We sat in on a talk by a Canadian named
Brad Gosse, who talked about monetizing content and another talk presented by
Alison Vivas of
Pink Visual and
Doug Lichtman, a Professor at UCLA, surrounding anti-piracy strategies.
This got my boss' blood boiling, when he spoke out about how it is unfair that huge multinational corporations are going to be in control of whether or not you have access to the Internet if you illegally pirate content. That's right, this Professor was saying that the new law they are enacting will allow them to monitor your activities and then send you out an email saying you are cut off from using the Internet because you have used torrents to download too much porn that has been pirated.
Coincidentally, this talk was just in time for me to develop a stance regarding the
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which is a bill introduced by the US government and exactly what Mr. Lichtman was forewarning us about. It is a bill introduced to try and fight online traffic in copyright intellectual property and counterfeited goods. According to Wikipedia, "
Proposals include barring advertising
networks and payment facilities from conducting business with allegedly infringing websites, barring search engines
from linking to the sites, and requiring Internet Service Providers (ISP) to block access to the sites. The bill would criminalize the streaming
of such content, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison."
Enacting SOPA would drastically change the Internet we know and love today. The fabric of the Internet is built on the content that we provide, whether it be infringing copyright or not. The Stop Online Privacy Act means that sites like Tumblr, YouTube and many others that thrive off user generated content may no longer exist, or will be censored to the point that they will be rendered useless.
In fact, there is a really great book I am currently reading related to this topic called "
The Erotic Engine: How Pornography Has Powered Mass Communication, From Gutenberg to Google" by
Patchen Barss.
From cave painting to photography to the Internet, pornography has always been at the cutting edge in adopting and exploiting new developments in mass communication. And in so doing, it has helped to promote and propel those developments in ways that are rarely acknowledged. Without pornography, the internet would not have grown so quickly. The e-commerce payment systems that are now commonplace would be at a far more primitive stage security and usability. Without video streaming software developed for pornography sites, CNN would be struggling to deliver news clips. Without advertising from sex sites, Google could not have afforded YouTube.
What do you think needs to be done to combat piracy? Should SOPA be enacted as a law, or do individual webmasters need to develop stronger security measures for their personal content to prevent illegal downloading?
