Blackout

Tragically, SOPA and PIPA are not characters from Grimm's Fairly Tales, although their potential to harm rivals the most evil characters the Grimm Brothers ever imagined.  


In reality SOPA and PIPA are the acronyms for the two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate designed in Machiavellian fashion by panicked Hollywood moguls to protect their stranglehold on the creative arts.  Their highly paid minions in Congress will claim that SOPA (short for the "Stop Online Piracy Act") and PIPA (short for "Protect Intellectual Property Act") are merely modest efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites.  However, it's not about protecting copyrights at all, it's actually about control, protecting profits and, ultimately, censorship.


SOPA and PIPA are designed in a way that infringes free expression while harming the Internet. Both acts criminalize the act of providing links, the very backbone of the Internet.  Hence, if I link, however innocently, to a site that host stolen copyrighted content (like YouTube, for example), my blog site might be closed down.


Detailed information about these bills can be found in the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act articles on Wikipedia. 


GovTrack lets you follow both bills through the legislative process: SOPA on this page, and PIPA on this one. 


The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to advocating for the public interest in the digital realm, has summarized why these bills are simply unacceptable in a world that values an open, secure, and free Internet.