According to Wikipedia -

SOPA and PIPA are badly drafted legislations that won't be effective in their main goal (to stop copyright infringement), and will cause serious damage to the free and open Internet. They put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won't have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn't being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines. And, SOPA and PIPA build a framework for future restrictions and suppression.

So, they have blacked out wikipedia for 1 day.

What do you think?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more

A great post about why they are bad -
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-principles-supporting-free-speech

Examination/explaintions -

http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/17/technology/sopa_explained/index.htm
http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/technical-examination-of-sopa-and.html

It would smell like CompuServe, an old anal relic of thwarted internet control that finally, recently, coughed it's last foul breath.

Videos -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJIuYgIvKsc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhwuXNv8fJM

I understand piracy is a problem, but a certain percentage of outreach of all media will either be free or pirated - in today's world and definately so in tomorrow's, no comapny will ever again recieve the revenue for every use of its media - that is the truth - big or small, a certain percentage will be leached out, but doing anything against it would result in censorship and loss of rights.
I say that the piracy is the price companies must pay for the global outreach through the internet.

Monies can still be made with advertising that companies can do. As an example You-tube has allot of different advertising on it when you want to listen to something. It also has ways to buy that which you are viewing and other offers from those who are being viewed. Many companies have found ways to earn a dollar although not as much as they would like I'm sure but this is a new way to expose a company to a wider group of interested people. In the past many things wouldn't ever be known because there was no way anyone would ever get to know about a product or talent because only a few controlled the media but today with the internt they now can access the entire world for a fraction of money.

Sites like Google and Wiki are not against anti Piracy rules.
The sites selling other people's works are thieves, no question.
They just want the laws to be tighter framed, so that they are not constantly dragged into court themselves.
Even though the laws are not aimed at google, wiki, et al, they would immediately become targets because of their size.
If this legislation goes through, copyright lawyers will be as happy as copyright lawyers can be,
and wiki in particular may face severe and unwarranted problems.
A big enough case could force it to either close or become a commercial site.

My vote is No.
Send the bills back for re-drawing.