SOPA - The axe that will cut the head off the Internet

It's the end of the Internet world as we know it.


For those wondering "What the fuck is SOPA?" or "What's this got to do with me?" I'll explain the idiot's guide.


SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act - literally, from the name it means it will stop online-piracy - "Great!" I hear you say. Actually, it's not. Here's why:
Everyone uses YouTube, Wikipedia, torrent sites etc where intellectual property such as music videos, articles on things and file-sharing are shown to other people. What happens at the moment is that if the company that hosts the servers finds that copyright has been breached, then the user account gets banned and the video taken down. That's fair, right? That's the way we want to keep it. (For file-sharing sites the site can sometimes be taken down depending on what the courts decide).


What SOPA will do is take it to a much higher level, so that the servers in the USA become property of the US government, and the companies are just merely users. Now you're thinking "err, what?". Put simply, it removes the end user (ourselves) becoming liable for copyright infringement and making the company liable for it, where before we would be liable and the company wouldn't.


The easiest way to explain this is using YouTube's example:


At the moment:
You upload a video to YouTube and it breaks copyright rules, you can end up in a whole lot of shit and depending on how bad it is. Your account gets banned and the video gets taken down.


What SOPA will do:
You upload a video to YouTube and it breaks copyright rules, the US government will find it and land YouTube (Google) in a whole heap of shit by blacklisting it so nobody is able to access it, at all, ever. You don't get in trouble but Google gets punished.


"But I'm in the UK, why will it affect me?"
YouTube is hosted by Google, whose servers are in the USA, so if/when SOPA is passed it is no longer Google's property, it's then the US government's property. Google are just the user of it.


"Okay, I kind of get it, but please explain what blacklisting is"
To explain it, I need to explain some of the technology behind it.


Every web address (domain name) has an IP address attached to it. An IP address is a numerical address which allows routers to find one another to get data somewhere. Most IP addresses have a domain name attached to it. To demonstrate this, go to command prompt (Run --> CMD) and type in PING WWW.GOOGLE.CO.UK (or .com if you're in the US), it will then show it's IP address. For me, it's 173.194.67.94. I go to that IP address by pasting that in the address bar of the browser (http://173.194.67.94/) returns www.google.co.uk. Google is a lot easier to remember than an IP address.


Blacklisting means to block the domain name on the DNS server (Domain Name Service server) so that NOBODY is able to access it. So, on the DNS server, if Google.co.uk is blacklisted, then, well, there's no Google, for anyone. It would also mean the IP address is blocked.


So if SOPA is passed - good night most of the Internet.


(If you're still confused, then it's pretty much the same legislation that's used in China).