SOPA A Righteous Cause or a Piracy Crusade Essay

SOPA: A Righteous Cause or a Piracy Crusade? To better understand the act, one needs to first examine what â€Å"SOPA† is and means. First and foremost, SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act. This act is essentially an extension of another bill that was sent through shortly before it. The name of this bill is the PROTECT IP act, which stands for Protecting Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property. Both these names are essentially very fancy names for an anti-theft law to protect the intellectual property of movie, music and other industries alike. From this, the logical questions one would come to is; what does this bill do? What is beneficial about it? What is harmful about it? How would it effect me and my daily†¦show more content†¦As it is common with any topic as controversial as the censorship of the entire internet, it has drawn a lot of big names on both sides of the fence. On one side of the fence are have the people who are for t he bill; this includes many big music and movie companies who say that they are losing billions due to the theft of their intellectual property through rogue sites such as â€Å"thepiratebay.org†. On the other side of the bill, there are many of the big internet companies of which are some of the greatest innovators of our time; amongst the companies taking up the opposition you have big names like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. All of these companies are taking up the stance that the new act is unconstitutional and would facilitate the government to be able to censor the flow of information, which is contrary to the First Amendment of the Constitution. Both sides of the debate have a very effective argument and only time will tell which side will win. Now that we know what the act does we must then look into the pros of the issue. The most viable benefit of this bill is the return of money to the companies that are being ravaged by the ongoing growth of internet piracy. It i s estimated that these rogue sites â€Å"have 53 billion hits per year, robbing the industries that create them of billions of dollars†(Congressional Digest). In addition to that, â€Å"The Chamber of Commerce estimates that U.S. companies lose