Today, many sites around the Internet are standing together in a mass blackout against the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA bills. Sites include Google, Tumblr, and Wikipedia just to name a few. Most of the participating sites are including redirection links to information about how to make your voice heard. This includes phone numbers to contact your state senators and also email forms if you prefer not to call in.

For those who don’t know, these two bills give the United States government complete control over almost anything on the internet. The “intent” of the bills is to give our government the ability to remove and/or censor sites from American viewing that have been accused (not convicted necessarily) of copyright infringement. This means that literally any website that accepts user-input content will be shut down or blocked; regardless of whether it is a USA based site or not. Meaning, more or less, your Facebook, MySpace, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube; ANY forum where a user can post something that might be copyrighted.

So imagine for a moment that you post a home video on YouTube. If any sort of copyrighted song, video, image, etc. is in the background, you could be sued for copyright infringement. You won’t be allowed to use anything as an example, for parody, or for educational purpose. (As right was given to us by the Fair Use agreement.) Basically this means that if these bills had been in place when Justin Bieber received his fame for doing cover songs on YouTube (because that will soon be illegal too) he would have been sued into the ground instead of achieving a rise to fame.