SOPA and PIPA

Two bills that are still lingering in Congress are the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. Both seek to fight off foreign websites that infringe on copyrighted material. They mostly focus on media piracy, but the sale of counterfeit good and medication is also included in the legislation. Wikipedia and Google have both spoken out against the legislation saying it itself is an infringement on Americans' right to free speech and that it is harmful to small businesses who thrive on their websites. Google has set up a petition that anyone can sign. Wikipedia has threatened to black out all of their English speaking Encyclopedia sections for 24 hours in protest. Others who are explicitly against the bills are Craigslist, eBay, Mozilla, and Twitter amongst others. SOPA is the more extreme of the two: it defines "foreign infringing site" as any site that is "committing or facilitating" copyright infringement. PIPA is more specific saying that it will limit websites that have "no significant use other than" copyright infringement. Currently, SOPA is stalled in the House Judiciary Committee as members continue to work on it. Although, it is said that there is another bill that will be proposed that takes a more narrow approach to the issues at hand. Members will begin voting for PIPA on January 24th.