The Stop Online Piracy Act

The Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA is a Bill in the House of Representatives aimed at eliminating online piracy. The bill will give the U.S. government the power to censor websites by disappearing sites that host information which potentially infringes on intellectual property or copyright laws. This would paralyze sites that have user-generated content such as YouTube, Reddit, Etsy, Flickr, and Vimeo. The Electronic Frontier Foundation predicts that these sites would likely shut down if the bill was to pass. The bill would also ban posting a link to any black listed sites, including links in search results and posted on social networking sites.

From Time Techland :

SOPA and PROTECT IP would allow prosecutors to get a court order declaring a foreign site as infringing, and the order could then be used to require DNS service providers to block the allegedly infringing sites. This means they will essentially be required to keep a blacklist of rogue foreign sites, and when a user tries to get the numerical address for a blacklisted site, the server would have to return either nothing or an error page. As far as the user is concerned, the site will have disappeared. Read more: http://techland.time.com/2011/11/07/congresss-piracy-blacklist-plan-a-cure-worse-than-the-disease/#ixzz1jHVKLqcu

This controversial bill has sparked protests and boycotts against companies that have publicly expressed their support for SOPA including GoDaddy.com, a web hosting company. Over 70,000 domains participated by transferring from godaddy during the boycott including large websites such as Wikipedia. Godaddy has since backed down from their public defense of the bill.

The newest form of protest is the SOPA blackout. Reddit has announced a 12 hour blackout on January 18, 2012. Instead of the normal reddit website, they will post a simple message about SOPA and stream live video of the House hearing where Internet entrepreneurs and technical experts, including reddit co-founder Alexis  Ohanian, will be testifying. Rumors have been circulating that Wikipedia, Facebook, and Google may join the blackout as well.

If SOPA is something that interests you, I urge you to do some research to find out more about this bill. The website ProPublica has a SOPA Opera tool that shows where members of congress stand on the SOPA bill. I urge you to contact your representatives and let them know how you feel about this bill.