SOPA

Over the last week, the words “SOPA” and “PIPA” have been thrown around again and again. Yet it seems that there are a lot of people that still have no idea what these acronyms stand for.  There are also few people that realize just how much damage these laws could do if they passed.
SOPA stands for the “Stop Online Piracy Act,” proposed  by US Representative Lamar Smith (Republican) in October 2011. The bill was created to allow law enforcement to expand their searches for online piracy and copyright infringement. If passed, all sites that support online piracy of music, movies, etc. could be blocked and all links to the sites shut down by law enforcement officers. Google would have to refigure their searches to make sure that none of the sites that come up are related to any online piracy sites. If the law passed, officers would also be able to enforce the arresting of anyone who pirates anything, including, but not limited to, the streaming of copyrighted material. The penalty for violating this law could land someone in jail for a maximum of five years.
Despite common belief and fear, SOPA would not affect the social media sites like Facebook and Twitter unless those sites included ads or links to illegal downloading sites. The act does not give the right to censor every single post or Tweet that goes up on the internet.
After a week of protesting, petitioning and the black outs of over 7,000 websites in January 2012, the SOPA bill was postponed until congress can come to a majority agreement of a solution to the piracy issue.
PIPA stands for the “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act,” proposed by US Senator Patrick Leahy (Democrat) in May 2011. This bill, much like the SOPA bill, was created to aid in the decreasing of online piracy and trade of illegal digital media. It would focus more on the illegal trading of digital media from other countries to the US. This act would not affect social media sites unless made obvious that users are trading illegal digital media.
 During the same week that the country was protesting the SOPA bill, the PIPA bill was also receiving a lot of heat. After the week of protesting, Senator Harry Reid decided to postpone the vote on the bill for reasons akin to those faced on the SOPA bill.
As for right now, both bills do not seem likely to pass through congress. With the 7 million plus signatures that Google raised on January 18, 2012 while petitioning both bills, it seems that Congress is concerned about the effects of the bills on the people.