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SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act, basically dealing with issues like copyright infringement and piracy-words we normally read on service agreements. The US government has now passed a bill on the 26th of November 2011, to fight online trafficking, piracy, and copyright infringement over the internet. So far so good. But really, what difference does it make to us? Thousands of bills are passed every year, many that most of us aren't even aware of. Then why are techie hotshots like Larry Page, Mark Zuckerburg, making such a hue and cry over it?
The bill enables the copyright holders to seek judiciary action against any website that facilitates copyrighting. That means, search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing wouldn't be able to link themselves to such sites (and worse feature them on their search lists). Also our beloved PayPal will not be allowed to carry out any business transactions with such websites. This would mean the open source software available all over the net, crack versions of expensive software, every form of piracy rampant on the internet, will be vanishing in no time. Also it imposes charges of felony on illegal streaming, which means no more sneak previews of movies till the official release date. For users sharing videos on Twitter and YouTube, anything that comes under the category of mildly offensive could be banned straightaway.
What effect worldwide could this bill have? Every other country that was in the process of passing such a bill highlighting concerns of their interest, like capping down of political dissent, hate speech against prominent dignitaries would get an impetus in the same direction. This eventually would lead to the screening and deletion of everything and anything that might be posted on the internet-as blogs, articles, hubs or whatever you name it. Basically this bill could lead to the suppression of the basic "Freedom to speech".
USA seems to be going the same way as Chinese government did with control over China's DNS servers. It spells a touch down on the already fluctuating markets. This bill when enacted, not only affects just the entertainment and information technology sectors, but will have further tumultuous repercussions on every other sector. The revenue generated through online trading or e-commerce forms a large part of the annual U.S. revenue. To cut down on a majority of the business-to-business trading by means of this act will lead to a significant decline in the revenue therein.
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