If you are running a website that features comments, a forum or any user generated content then you should know about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Today, Reddit, Wikipedia and thousands of other websites have turned off in a worldwide protest against two proposed American laws that could change the online economy forever.

The arguments concern two pieces of legislation. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a attempt to deal with the growth in online piracy and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) relates to digital copyright. Both pieces of legislation have been designed to tackle piracy such as downloading illegal copies of films hosted in countries with little or no copyright laws.

Under the new Acts, downloading or streaming copyrighted material without the owners permission could be punishable by up to five years in jail. Quite reasonable, you might think? However, the punishments also extend to any website that is "enabling or facilitating piracy". This could be interpreted in such a way that a whole website could be shut down for one link to a suspected illegal site. User generated content added to websites would also be covered by the bills, making the owners of a website legally responsible for all the content of the site, even though it may be added by others.

Until very recently, the Bills also recommended technical changes which could instantly block websites that are the subject of a court order. This would effectively give the FBI a key to controlling the Internet much like the great censorship firewall of China. However after grumblings from the White House, Paul Brigner from the Motion Picture Association of America has conceded that "domain name filtering is really off the table".

Away from the censorship arguments, it's unlikely that many small business websites will find themselves at the wrong end of the proposed new bills. However, big Internet businesses could be forced to change the way they operate to guard against illegal user generated content being maliciously added to their sites and then reported. This could have a knock on effect on many of the services we take for granted online and in particular sites like Wikipedia which is perhaps why we see them at the centre of the current argument.

In my opinion, both SOPA and PIPA are good examples of well intentioned legislation that runs into problems by being both badly written and too broad in scope. Although it seems unlikely that the bills will pass in their current form, the ongoing war of words will no doubt continue. On one side you have the content holders, newspapers, hollywood and record companies who (generally speaking) haven't done very well out of the wild west of the Internet. On the other side you have Silicon Valley and companies like Google who may not support copyright theft but don't exactly make it hard for people to find illegal copies of media online (and in the case of Google is happy to sell advertising space next to links to illegal movie sites).

As for Artsgraphica, we support the Internet of the little man, the business owner and the entrepreneur. We believe that the online space should be a free marketplace where all good ideas have their chance to thrive. We don't support piracy but we also don't believe that SOPA/PIPA is the right approach to combat it. Hopefully, if today's campaign makes enough noise, the US Senate and House of Representatives will agree with us.