20/11/2011

US Internet "Piracy" Bill and Europes Silver-Lining


The Internet world is at a buzz with news about the US Internet Censorship Bill passing the Senate, but how will this impact games, the economy and Europe?


Times are changing and for the United States (so far atleast) it seems that its turning to the worst as the US Internet Piracy Bill, or Censorship Bill as people call it, got approved by the Senate. So what does this bill exactly mean?

Websites and other programs, such as Youtube will be censored if the people holding the copyright documents seem deem to it, and since we know Youtube for its spoilerastic nature, it will almost seized in half. Now think bigger, facebook, flickr, twitter and so on will be watched and they will censor (and sometimes wrongfully) if something looks "rogue", breaching what was USA long time policy of liberty of speech. 

EUA will be one of four already censoring countries around the world.
Now on the gaming area, things look doubtful as if it will help or harm. On one hand we have the hackers and cheaters that won't be able to lodge a USA based file host and piracy won't be able to be so full fledged which in turn might help the game development and publishing economy rake in more money they already have, but on the other hand what will happen to modders and other useful things we like that sometimes break the policies enacted by the game developers\publishers? We won't know, and hopefully we won't see a major consequence on the gaming department but we will probably see however, a significant shift on the servers position, people will flee the censorship witch hunt that might happen from Nintendo, Sony and EA which already claimed the support of the C. Bill.

Things go way deeper as this will give the government a way to violate your privacy and block a lot of good content that sometimes the publishers are so darn pesky to agree with, but you can see the entire bill HERE.

Things will be censored by the copyright holders as they please.
There might be however a silver-lining for Europe here, as conjecturing, companies will leave the US ISP hosts and so on to house themselves overseas, and if Europe doesn't go the same way as the USA, Europeans might be the center of the Internet world being the host of the fleeing censorship companies, giving possibly more revenue to Europe which is surely in need of!

Small infographic demonstrating what the censorship bill will do if passed

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