Gizmodo has offered a detailed and easy to understand explanation of how SOPA works if passed:
The beating heart of SOPA is the ability of intellectual property owners (read: movie studios and record labels) to effectively pull the plug on foreign sites against whom they have a copyright claim.
If Warner Bros, for example, says that a site in Italy is torrenting a copy of The Dark Knight, the studio could demand that Google remove that site from its search results, that PayPal no longer accept payments to or from that site, that ad services pull all ads and finances from it, and —most dangerously—that the site’s ISP prevent people from even going there. Perhaps the most galling thing about SOPA in its original construction is that it let IP owners take these actions without a single court appearance or judicial sign-off. All it required was a single letter claiming a “good faith belief†that the target site has infringed on its content.
What we are particularly interested in is how this bill could destroy the jailbreaking community. Joshua Hill known as p0sixninja of the Chronic Dev Team points out that SOPA could make the distribution of jailbreaking software illegal!!!
Although the US Government made jailbreaking legal back in 2010, the distribution of jailbreaking software could be deemed illegal under SOPA because it contains Apple’s [reversed-engineered] IP which would simply mean the end of jailbreaking and jailbreak news.
We are trying to fight SOPA. So, if you are a US citizen, email your respective congressman and help us put an end to this bill.
