Reddit IAmA from Riot Games lawyer re SOPA

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Reddit IAmA from Riot Games lawyer re SOPA

Kudos to Riot for letting him do this (and to him for being brave enough to do it!). A quote:

We object to SOPA because it hurts how our users consume legitimate content on in the internet, and it makes it much harder to engage our community. That sucks - and we’re devoting a lot of time and brainpower as to how to stop this from happening.

And another:

This doesn’t hit us nearly as hard as it hits our community. I’ll just give a few tangible examples:

Streaming: There’s no way that Riot can risk promoting our streamers by linking or embedding. We have no effective way to pre-screen a streamer’s content (although we definitely DO urge that people respect IP law). Under the DMCA, we definitely get some breathing room here if someone commits infringement. Under SOPA, even an embed potentially exposes us to injunctions against payment providers, ad networks, and potentially worse given the immunity provisions in §105(a).

And keep in mind that many streaming sites would be §102 (foreign) sites - subject to DNS blocking. Oh wait, my bad. “Feasible” blocking now. Whoops. So really, there’s an open question as to if these would exist.

Links in the forums: Yeah, again, no effective way to pre-screen. Absolutely gone. That’s one step removed from our top level domain. This is truly scary stuff.

In short, think of it this way. Any serious engagement of our community that involves derivative content of OUR IP that is not rigorously screened and cleared has the potential to expose us to such a magnitude of liability that the business case is prohibitive.