Video Game Manufacturers Razer And Red 5 Take A Stand Against SOPA at CES

The interwebs are going wild about SOPA (Stop Online Privacy Act). We’ve all read the story by now about XDA and many other web companies like Reddit, who are going dark this week on January 18th to raise awareness about SOPA.

Well these guys at CES could not have said it any better.  Although many in the video game industry are believed to be protected by SOPA because of online piracy, many companies actually agree that SOPA is too restrictive and that the government shouldn’t be able to exert as much control as they are proposing.

It’s true that millions of dollars are lost in online piracy but it’s very hard these days to associate actual numbers to the losses of the copyright holders and creators. On one hand copyright owners may be losing initial dollars from someone downloading an mp3 or a torrent of a movie, on the other hand it’s well-known that even pirated copies of music, videos, movies and software lead to building not just scale but popularity.

SOPA affects everyone who uses the internet. If SOPA is to pass than then websites could be shut down without warning if a site is believed to be violating copyrights. In addition SOPA could cause websites from being blocked from ad payment networks and payment facilitators like PayPal.

For more on SOPA read this wiki