In the US, legislation is being debated which will have a significant impact on your life.

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (PROTECT* IP Act) sound benign until you read more about them. Effectively, these two pieces of legislation will allow media companies and the US Government to censor the internet.

In response, after months of trying to get the US congress to change the two acts, companies like Wikipedia, Google and numerous websites have gone "dark". This video gives you a brief rundown of what SOPA and PIPA will do:

Or if you prefer, Wikipedia has one page available for you today all about the two acts. In fact there are great write ups almost everywhere at the moment. You have no excuse not to be educated on this issue after today. But why would you care about a piece of US law?

Remember this?

New Zealand has almost passed laws like this after intense lobbying from the US and the entertainment industry. If SOPA and PIPA pass not only might some services you use (like Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter etc) suddenly not work or even not exist anymore, but local sites may suddenly find themselves blocked from the US.

Moreover many security firms have noted SOPA may make the web more dangerous.

It's easy to simply tar anyone who is against the two acts as someone who supports piracy. This is false. Google, which owns YouTube, already has a policy about removing content and you don't even have to be a pirate to be blocked.  Just a comment on your blog linking to potential copyright infringement could see you blocked. Uploading a YouTube video with music in the background is grounds for an infringement that could see YouTube blocked if you don't remove it.

It's basically, as technology and social network expert Clay Shirky says, "taking innocent until proven guilty and reversing it".

*Protecting Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act

Hadyn Green - Technical Writer

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