Firstly welcome to our newest blog section - Industry News.
Industry News will cover significant events that may affect or influence Nitrome Development. We will use this as an opportunity not just to highlight the event but to give our opinion or highlight potential benefits or problems that arise. Our old 'News' category will still continue to cover events that are directly involving Nitrome.
Our first story to cover is about the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) that are currently being discussed. The aim of the SOPA is to stop online piracy by giving more power to the American government in effect allowing them to turn off any site that they feel infringes piracy laws and a lot of film and music studios are pushing for this bill to pass.
On the other side, a lot of powerful web based companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Reddit etc.) are against the act as they suggest it may cause big changes to popular sites and web services. Imagine if Youtube was taken down as a result of a user uploading copyrighted material for example.
So how does this affect Nitrome?
Well, as we make all of our own content, hopefully it wouldn’t have any direct impact either way, but some services that we use such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube could be affected so it’s not without consequence. Lots of sites such as those mentioned (i.e. Reddit) are planning to take their services offline from 18th January in protest of the bill. Although Nitrome is in opposition of the 'Stop Online Piracy Act' we will be keeping the site online as per normal. You may however find disruption to the social sites that we use. So take this as a heads up just incase! :)
SOPA Article on Wikipedia: Click Here
SOPA in the News: Click Here
