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       January 19, 2012

(CNN Student News) -- January 19, 2012 STORY HIGHLIGHTS SOPA,PIPA Cause Controversy Online Protests AZUZ: First up, SOPA and PIPA. These are two bills being considered in Congress right now. SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act. PIPA stands for the Protect IP Act. Both of them are focused on stopping Internet piracy. But these bills are causing a lot of controversy, especially on the Internet. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) AZUZ (voice-over): If you went to Google`s front page yesterday, you saw this big black box covering up the logo. You also might have noticed that you couldn`t access some websites. The companies that run those sites were protecting against these bills. On one side of this debate, you have people who argue that online piracy leads to lost income and lost jobs for companies that create content. The critics argue that SOPA and PIPA could turn into censorship. And others say Internet pirates will just find a way around them anyway. (END VIDEO CLIP) SOPA Explainer AZUZ: It`s already illegal to steal someone else`s property online. Julianne Pepitone explains how SOPA is different, how it would work and the impact it could have, whether it does or doesn`t become law. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) JULIANNE PEPITONE, CNNMONEY.COM: Content creators have battled against piracy for years. But it`s tough for U.S. companies to take action against overseas websites. SOPA is an acronym for the Stop Online Piracy Act. It`s a proposed House bill that aims to crack down copyright infringement by restricting sites that host pirated content. SOPA`s main targets are rogue overseas websites, like The Pirate Bay, which are a troll for illegal downloads of music, movies and other content. Most of these websites make money off of ads, so SOPA goes after that revenue stream. Under SOPA, if The Pirate Bay were found to be hosting pirated content, a judge could order U.S.-based ad networks and payment processors that serve The Pirate Bay to cut off the website completely. In general, SOPA`s supporters are media companies like CNN parent TimeWarner and groups like the Motion Picture Association of America. SOPA`s opponents are big tech companies like Google, Facebook and AOL. Both sides tend to agree that protecting copyrighted content is a worthy goal. But SOPA`s opponents say that the way SOPA is written effectively promotes censorship and is rife with unintended consequences, and that it blames websites for its individual users` actions. On January 13th, the bill`s sponsors removed one of the most controversial parts of SOPA. As originally written, SOPA would have required Internet service providers to block access to websites that law enforcement officials deemed promoting piracy. So if U.S. users tried to visit The Pirate Bay, their browser wouldn`t take them there. One day after that part of the bill was removed, the White House released a statement saying it would not support any legislation that tampers with the Internet`s fundamental architecture. If you visit foreign websites that host copyrighted content, like The Pirate Bay, you could see them slowly start to disappear as their revenue streams are cut off. Theoretically, search engines like Google wouldn`t show flagged sites in their search results, and payment processors like PayPal couldn`t transmit funds to them. If SOPA doesn`t pass, the current law would stay in place. For example, let`s say a user uploads a copyrighted song to a website. The copyright holder could then contact the website and ask them to take it down in a reasonable amount of time. (END VIDEO CLIP)