SOPA and PIPA – What are they?
Recently, you must have heard a lot of the buzzwords – SOPA and PIPA. But, what are they? They made a lot of headlines recently and have subsided as quickly as they gained attention. SOPA stands for Stop Online Piracy Act and PIPA is the acronym for protect IP Act. Both the bills aim at foreign websites that encroach on copyrighted materials and deliver those freely to common public. There is no law today which would stop this infringement against foreign websites like 'The Pirate Bay' or 'Mega Upload'. These are bills which the congress has been trying to pass and once approved will allow the government to take strict actions against websites which infringed copyrighted material. However, these are not something new and have been around doing the rounds for quite some time. SOPA attempts to bring to court such websites, while PIPA aims to block such sites from the internet service provider layer and even filter out such websites on search engine results. Recently, with the stimulation from music and movie industries, these bills gained attention and were to be presented to Congress for an approval. While most of the media companies are for it, all the major technology companies are in fact against the bill.
You must have heard about most websites which had de-labeled their logos on a January day to denote their non-support towards the bills. These were major companies including Google, Craigslist, Mozilla and Wikipedia, which also included on their site an explanation as to why they are not supportive. The same day, more than 10000 websites went black and more than 7 million people signed petitions on Google.com opposing the bills. Anyways, the current state of things is that decision on both the bills has been deferred until March of 2012 citing the chaos caused due to them. While the Anti-SOPA groups and campaigners celebrate for a short while, Hollywood is disappointed. We'll see what happens next when once again these bills rise from their graves!
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