The Stop Online Piracy Act has been one of the most controversial piece’s of legislation in recent memory, and marketers have been closely following as the bill has the potential to suddenly shut down websites for pirated content (whether webmasters realize they’ve infringed copyrights or not). While SOPA has been shelved for the moment, a number of websites are preparing to blackout tomorrow, January 18, in protest of the legislation.
The upcoming blackout will also protest the Protect IP Act, another bill aimed at curbing piracy on the web. In general, opponents of these bills do not support piracy, but they adamantly oppose some of the punishments proposed by the laws, such as the throttling of websites.
Opposition from the White House also came over the weekend, which made it even less likely that the bill would receive enough support in the House to become law. Nonetheless, popular websites are scheduled to participate in a voluntary blackout on Wednesday to protest the bill.
As many popular online destinations will go dark, consumers are heading to the web en masse to research the bill and the motivation behind it. Additionally, others are reading to see which websites are participating in the blackout. Among the major websites taking part are Wikipedia, Mozilla and Reddit.
Those researching the controversy are searching the web, with “Wikipedia Blackout,” “PIPA,” “SOPA” and “SOPA PIPA” proving Google trending topics at press time. While “#blackoutsopa” s not a trending Twitter topic at press time, the frequency with which social media users are discussing the subject will likely send it that way by Wednesday. Also, public posts on Facebook for “SOPA” are being updated by the minute.
Google, Facebook and Twitter have all come out against the bill, but their status as information and marketing hubs on the web makes it difficult for them to participate in the blackout.
For SEO campaigns, the SOPA blackout may negatively impact search standing in the sense that any links to and from these websites supporting a company’s ranking will be eliminated for the day. However, marketers interested in blacking out their sites can learn how to do so with minimal SEO consequences in a Webmaster Central blog post from Google.
