On October 26^th, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was introduced to congress by Lamar Smith, a republican representative from Texas, but as of January 16^th, the bill’s progress has been halted. The bill proposed to combat online piracy of both counterfeit goods and intellectual property, such as music, T.V. shows, and music, by means of a firewall that would block any offshore websites that host file sharing or peer-to-peer downloading,  as well as block links to these sites from search engines such as Google and Yahoo!.

    This bill was been met with much controversy by websites and organizations such as Google, eBay, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with Wikipedia organizing a blackout of their English language web pages on January 18^th in protest.  It had been called an infringement of free speech and a violation of the 1^st amendment. The firewalls that would be used were essentially the same as those used by governments in the Middle East to block online communications by participants in the Arab Spring movement, and had also been used in China to block websites that go against the beliefs of the government.

    Online piracy has been stated as a principal reason for the decline in record sales by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) over the past decade. SOPA intended to reverse this, but critics state that the terms defined by the bill are so broad that it would essentially kill many legitimate websites operating within the confines of the law, in its current form. Critics also state that, while a decrease in record sales can be attributed to piracy, the overall problem is not piracy alone, but a combination of the economic recession and the RIAA’s inability to adapt to current consumer trends.

    A release from the White House stated that “Any provision covering Internet intermediaries such as online advertising networks, payment processors, or search engines must be transparent and designed to prevent overly broad private rights or action that could encourage unjustified litigation that could encourage unjustified litigation that could discourage startup businesses and innovative firms from growing.” The Obama Administration has voiced its opposition to the bill in its current form, which has been a factor in Congress’s decision to shelve it.

    The bill was largely supported by organizations such as the RIAA, Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Vicacom. Critics argue that the bill works only in the interest of these organizations and the corporations that form them, such as Warner Brothers, Sony Music Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, and Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group. The openness of the bill’s wording would leave it up to these studios to determine what legally constitutes as piracy, which could restrict freedom of the web by blocking artists working for independent studios and labels who distribute their product by alternative means.

    While SOPA has been shelved due to opposition, its Senate counterpart, PROTECT IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act) is still up for discussion and faces much of the same criticism.