Big and bright in the news today is that the Riot Games, the publisher of the extremely popular MMO, Riot Games, came out to the US political arena as being squarely dead-set against the Internet censorship bills SOPA and PROTECT-IP. They’ve even sent a representative attorney to Reddit to solicity the community there about how they should go about proceeding with their advocacy against these bills…
But it gets better!
In the very thread that they published about their opposition to the bills, a United States Congressman, Representative Jared Polis of Colorado, posted a comment explaining his position on SOPA
“As a member of the League of Legends community (partial to Anivia and Maokai),” Rep Polis writes, “and as someone who made his living as an Internet entrepreneur before being elected to Congress, I’m greatly concerned about the future of the Internet and gaming if Congress doesn’t wake up. You may have heard that Congress is currently considering a bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. While SOPA has a ton of problems, there are some significant issues that I thought fellow gamers might want to know about.”
He goes on to say that he’s greatly concerned with SOPA because it will likely stifle exactly the type of innovation that brings us games such as LoL and points out how SOPA makes it far too simple for angry competitors to level the playing field with the nuclear option by removing competition. It also means that indie developers and small media companies will have to live in constant fear of the shadow of larger players in the field.
To wit, he explains, “That’s why companies like Riot, who want to protect the games they create, are opposed to SOPA.”
If only other video game companies would wake up and use this reason to lobby the government and tell them that laws regulating the Internet and their content aren’t just unnecessary, they’re failures waiting to happen.
While legislators are dangerous beasts under the usual case, it’s good to see one who actually is part of the video game community to come out and mention an understanding of the problems that affect us directly. It certainly looks like SOPA and PROTECT-IP are being railroaded into law by the entertainment industry in spite of widespread political and popular dissent so…
It may be too much to hope that all of Congress will listen leave the Internet and video games alone.
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