So there’s all this business going on around the Internet about SOPA, and everyone has their questions about it.  How’s it supposedly stopping piracy? Why do a lot of major websites hate it? Why do a lot of big companies support it? What the heck does it even stand for?

Let’s start with the basics.  SOPA is a proposed anti-piracy bill and stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act.  SOPA aims to stop major piracy supporting websites.  Most of the websites primarily serve American clients but are housed off of American soil in places like Sweden (The Pirate Bay) or China.  Because of this, the American government has virtually no control over the illegal file sharing taking place beyond arresting American users of the site—of whom there are too many to conceivably arrest, and with which there is not enough evidence to confirm illegal downloads.

Should it pass, the bill would allow the federal government to effectively “cut off the air supply” from these file sharing sites by restricting US sites from providing links, support, or anything else deemed advantageous towards these sites.  Essentially what this means is that if you were to search “The Pirate Bay” on Google, it would appear as if the site does not and never existed.  The issue with this policy is the vague wording of the clause, which isn’t clear enough as to what kind of actions are classified as supporting piracy.

#StopSOPA