What is SOPA and PIPA?

SOPA is the acronym for Stop Online Piracy Act, the bill proposed in the House of Representatives to (you guessed it) stop online piracy.  PIPA is the Protect Intellectual Property Act, the parallel bill proposed in the Senate.

The legislation's main intent is to stop illegal copies of films, music, or other media hosted on foreign servers.

The penalty proposed by the bills for anyone found guilty of streaming copyrighted content without permission 10 or more times within six months is five years in jail. (So 9 times in 6 months, or 10+ times over the course of a year are ok, I guess.)

Sounds pretty reasonable, doesn't it? But here is where it gets a little dicey.

What will SOPA / PIPA do?

The US government and rights holders would have the right to seek court orders against any site accused of "enabling or facilitating" piracy. This could theoretically involve an entire website being shut down because it contains a link to a suspect site (YouTube come to mind?).

US-based internet service providers, payment processors and advertisers would be outlawed from doing business with alleged copyright infringers. SOPA also calls for search engines to remove infringing sites from their results - PIPA does not include this provision.

The bills would also outlaw sites from containing information about how to access blocked sites.

The bills originally demanded that internet service providers block users from being able to access suspect sites using a technique called Domain Name System (DNS) blocking.

What could SOPA / PIPA mean for the Internet?

This would effectively make them "disappear" from the internet - and is a process already used in China and Iran. However, after opponents claimed this could disrupt the internet's underlying architecture, the chief sponsor of each bill agreed to ditch the measure.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

To protect sites against false claims of illegal activity SOPA proposes penalizing copyright holders who knowingly misrepresent a site's activity - however, PIPA does not contain this safeguard.

Both bills offer immunity to ISPs that block access to websites if they have "credible evidence" that the third party's pages contain unsanctioned copyright material. Critics claim this could create a conflict of interest as it may encourage firms to block access to competitors' sites.

It could also encourage firms to take a "safety first" approach resulting in users being prevented from viewing legal material. That sounds exactly like what our legal system is all about "“ guilty until proven innocent. Right?

What is the current status of SOPA / PIPA?

SOPA's supporters are trying to reach consensus on the bill before putting it to a vote in the House of Representatives, which suggests that any vote may be some way off.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid plans to put PIPA up for a vote in the upper house on January 24.

Supporters of the bills include television networks, music publishers, movie industry bodies, book publishers and manufacturers.

Critics include Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo, eBay, LinkedIn, AOL and Zynga.

A blackout by several major Internet companies, including Wikipedia, is planned in protest of SOPA / PIPA for January 18.

Sources: BBC News http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16596577

Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/16/wikipedia-blackout-jimmy-wales-sopa_n_1208947.html