SOPA Issue

Recently there is a big issue to do with SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). Several companies are supporting this act, such as Nike, Viacom and Pfizer. However there are several opposing it too, such as Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia.... and the list goes on.

As you can tell, some of the biggest online companies are opposing this act. You may have noticed that most of the supporting companies are product based, this is probably to stop people selling counterfeit goods over the internet.

Companies like Google, Yahoo! and Wikipedia are opposing it because they deal with information which will be restricted if SOPA is inforced. Wikipedia will lose thousands of pages, Google will have to restrict searches, and so will Yahoo! Google, the largest search engine in the world, will be restricted and will only show us certain results instead of all the possiblities.

Another issue with SOPA is that if they closed down one illegal site another 5 will be opened and so it will be pointless to close them down in the first place, that just how the internet works. However because of the restrictions on search engines, they will be harder to find but they will still exist.

In conclusion, I think that SOPA will not make much of a difference except for make these illegal file sharing websites less obvious however they will still be working just as well and still selling and sharing products and files illegally.