stop sopa

all the news this morning is about sopa (stop on-line piracy act) and pipa (protect intellectual property act) - two bills heading for congressional vote. wikipedia has shut its site down for the day in protest, and sites like google, craigslist, and wired have blanketed their sites today with information about sopa. the bills are backed by big media companies and are meant to help stop the illegal downloading and streaming of tv shows, movies and music. the tech companies fear however, that they will give media companies too much power to shut down any site that they say is abusing copyright. 
no one wants to start down the road to censoring the web and these 2 pieces of legislation, fears are, may do just that.