In the communist country of China, political and religious speech is censored on the Internet, and sites similar to Twitter and Facebook are banned. In the United States, we quickly turn up our noses at that awful freedom of speech infringement, but recent House and Senate bills prove American government, while far from communist, isn't as perfect as we often pretend.
The Stop Online Piracy Act bill in the House and Protect IP Act in the Senate were created to protect intellectual property on the Web. They would allow the Justice Department to require websites to remove all links to sites that contain pirated copyright material, according to a Jan. 20 Washington Post article. While it sounds like a positive idea — give creators credit for their work, not those guilty of piracy — the rhetoric of these bills is intrusive and could lead the way toward online censorship.
These bills could grant the attorney general the power to create a blacklist of websites to be blocked by service providers because of even one page of potential infringement, all without a court hearing, according to a Nov. 16 New York Times column. The duty of finding these pirated materials would fall on the backs of the website operators, threatening legal action if they do not vet materials before posting. Think of the damage this could do to user-generated sites like YouTube or Facebook, which are updated by thousands of users throughout the world every minute. It would be impossible to keep up.
Currently, such sites are protected by a provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which provides protection from prosecution as long as the sites take down infringing material as soon as it is pointed out. SOPA would demolish that immunity, holding massive sites hostage to governmental wrath.
SOPA and PIPA also pose economic threats. Movie studios and recording companies are proponents of the legislation because they want their clients to receive all the fortunes they deserve, which is a fair motive, but let's not forget about the little guys. Start-up companies would struggle with legal risks and potential financial burdens because of the overhead spending required to monitor potential Web content for pirated copyright material. It would discourage entrepreneurs from creating the next large social networking or file-sharing site.
"The idea that we're going to preemptively have the government start censoring the Internet on behalf of giant corporations' economic interests, strikes me as exactly the wrong thing to do," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in opposition to the bills, according to the Washington Post article.
I'm all for the government assisting in protecting our civil liberties, because it's their duty. However, when economic interests come before vital rights of our country, like freedom of speech, the government needs to step back.
While it's doubtful these bills truly carry the power to blacklist sites as popular and prosperous as YouTube or Facebook, they could harm our freedom of speech on the Web.
The beauty of the Internet is that it's an anything-goes forum. Yes, people who pirate thousands of dollars of copyrighted music and movies are guilty and do deserve some type of retribution, but forcing an Internet provider to monitor a customer's web traffic is an unconstitutional prior restraint against protected speech.
Luckily, millions of Internet users agree. Last week, Google, Facebook and Wikipedia "blacked-out" in protest of the bills and urged viewers to sign petitions in opposition. The mass amounts of negative feedback have encouraged members of Congress to "indefinitely postpone" the vote.
However, a new bill, OPEN, has been introduced. Unlike SOPA and PIPA, OPEN would only pose a legal threat to sites that willfully promote copyright violation, according to a Jan. 21 PC World article. OPEN is a step in a better direction, but there's a chance even this slight amount of regulation could lead to Internet censorship. Contact your state representative or sign one of the many online petitions in opposition of these bills to secure the freedom of speech our Constitution grants us.
Molly Skyles is a senior communication major from St. Louis
is a member of the 
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