What is the SOPA/PIPA in dumby speak?

[Foolishfog862]

Cut the official crap and sophisticated mumbo-jumbo. I want to know what the hell this SOPA thing is and whether it will affect me, because I live in Australia.

What's the big deal with it? I've read enough articles and none of them actually tell me, in easy-to-understand words what's so bad about it.

If it passes... will there be an increased risk for people who illegally download things? What about websites like... MP3 Rocket and other websites that allow you to download videos from the Net. Will they all be gone?

[Whortleberry]

You can safely forget SOPA/PIPA, as the US Congress is busily doing. They have all backed away from it after the uproar caused by Wikipedia etc. going dark.

The idea of these bills was to stop the use of pirated material on the Net -- in many ways a good idea. But the bills were so badly written that they would have shut down sites that were simply _accused_ of pirating, never mind anything being proven.

Those who opposed the bills feared that if they became law, they could/would be used to silence anyone who dissented from the government. Sounds farfetched, yes, but apparently this is what China uses to stifle all dissent.

Hope that helps.

[PoohBearPenguin]

SOPA/PIPA are the names of 2 proposed US laws designed to fight piracy. They would not have any effect on people outside of the US. Well, not much effect. Keep reading.

While the authors of the laws claim they're to fight piracy, what they really do is force internet sites to be responsible for enforcing other companies' copyright.

This means if you wanted to post some photos from your vacation at Disneyland on Facebook (for instance), you wouldn't be allowed to. Facebook would be responsible for verifying that all posts, photos, etc., from users did not violate any copyright laws. The amount of people and extra cost to Facebook would pretty much put them out of business...at least in the US. Facebook.co.au, for instance, would be under no such American laws.

Other sites, like eBay, would shut down entirely because no one could post items.

Search engines, like Google, would be unable to operate at all.

At best, the these laws would essentially shut down the internet as we know it within the US.

At worst, these laws would shut down the entire tech industry within the US and force it overseas, taking trillions of dollars in revenue and millions of high paying jobs with it.

Due to protests and the Megaupload shutdown (which was done without SOPA or PIPA) the discussion about these proposed laws has stopped.

[xpatinasia]

Since the legislation was withdrawn several days ago, it won't affect anyone.

[chorle]

These links might help one a video the second a flow chart