Wednesday was a momentous day in the history of the Internet. It was a day that saw some of the biggest sites in the world effectively close down in protest at proposed US legislation known as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) – a bill designed to fight online trafficking of copyrighted intellectual property such as music, films and video games. For 24 hours sites such as Wikipedia, Tumblr and WordPress (to name just a few) “blacked-out” their content in protest to what they feel are measures that go further than stopping online piracy, and instead, censor the internet.
Why is a free Internet so important, and how would a censored Internet affect the PR industry? By placing a bar on the freedom of information and investigation, working with journalists to build stories could become nearly unworkable. While we all know you can’t trust Wikipedia implicitly, for PRs and journos, it is a starting point. The fast-paced world of online journalism would be forever changed without it. It may seem to be a huge leap, but the consequences of there not being a “free internet”, would – in the grand scheme of things – mean that user-built sites whose lifeblood is content created by its users wouldn’t be possible and in turn the sharing of news and information that’s become part of our everyday lives.
You could argue the Internet is now ‘too big’ to be destroyed, however, if SOPA was in place in 11 years ago, sites like Wikipedia would in all likeliness not exist today. Incidentally, Wednesday, my first port of call to find out when Wikipedia launched was to check Wikipedia, which just goes to show how valuable a tool the site has become and how often we can take it for granted. And that was the point of yesterday’s black-out, these sites are as much part of our daily lives as BBC News or Coronation St. If they didn’t exist, our lives would be lesser for it.
Think of how many times a day you Wiki something or look up a video on YouTube. It could be for inspiration for a pitch or because you have to write a press release on the banana export legislation of Costa Rica. We get inspiration and information from the Internet. Hell, you could even think of a great campaign idea based on that video of Hello by Lionel Ritchie made up from film clips that seems to be going around. So what would really happen if SOPA went through?
In a nutshell, more trips to the library – and no wants that.
David Macnamara
