If you spent any time on the web this week, it would have been difficult for you to avoid the news of the impending Internet censorship legislation called SOPA and PIPA. Some major websites went dark and thousands of others modified their websites, facebook pages and twitter feeds in protest. You can read more about the issue here.
SOPA PIPA and Cosmetics
While looking at the list of companies that support this awful legislation, I noticed a number of companies from the cosmetic industry. They include…
3M
Chanel
Coty
Dow Chemical Company
Estee Lauder
Johnson & Johnson
Dolce & Gabbana
L’Oreal USA
Personal Care Products Council
Pfizer
Revlon
I don’t get it. Why would these cosmetic companies support censorship of the Internet? What is the benefit to them?
Chemcial companies like 3M & Dow Chemical? How does online piracy affect them?
The only thing that I can think of is that these companies are worried about pirated copies of their make-up or brands being made available on the Internet.
The PCPC is on the list of supporters!!! What the hell!!? A majority of their member companies don’t even support it. Very troubling PCPC.
Seriously, what are these organizations thinking?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow, I had no idea SOPA had some many supporters in our industry! Maybe they don’t realize these 7 problems with SOPA (paraphrased from Copyblogger):
1: Your site can be shut down even if you didn’t do anything wrong. For example, if someone leaves a comment on your blog that links to a site that uses a copyrighted image, YOUR site can be shut down!
2: SOPA won’t be effective against the REAL pirates because SOPA blocks sites by domain name while pirates can use IP addresses which are not blocked.
3: SOPA can punish the wrong people. Copyblogger says “There’s actually a provision that says that an ordinary user can go to jail for five years for posting any copyrighted work.”
4: SOPA is bad for the economy. A lot of economic innovation (i.e. jobs) is driven by small, privately held companies. These kind of jobs are not easily outsourced or replaced by robots. The last thing the economy needs right now is a law that puts unfair restrictions on these businesses.
5: Even big companies will be negatively affected by SOPA. These companies (Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, etc) are worried that SOPA will hamper their ability to innovate and to continue to grow the internet.
6: SOPA may create internet security loopholes because of how it will mess with domain names and registrations. Just what we need – more hacking and identify theft!
7: SOPA over-emphasizes the importance of the entertainment business. While movies, TV, music, etc, add a lot to the economy,
they don’t add “nearly as many jobs and dollars as the technology industry does.” In other words, the benefits of SOPA are not worth the costs.
Can’t understand it myself as no cosmetic company who has tv ads appearing on youtube has ever complained about it, as every hit is a personalised bit of free advertising. Brands like old spice have even based campaigns on twitter and youtube…
If they are worried about parody or their message being altered, unfortunately there is nothing that they can do about that as fair use and parody are already protected.
As for counterfeits and knockoffs? Well that is already very well policed by many agencies such as the FDA and US customs to name just two.
And if Sesame street parody your adverts—- You KNOW you’ve been successful
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkd5dJIVjgM