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"The House Judiciary Committee met to debate changes to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) on Thursday as the public debate between players with deep pockets on both sides reached new heights.\nIf the bill at issue, SOPA, were to become law, it would create a \u201Cblacklist\u201D of websites that infringe on copyrights. Private companies who allege that a site is unlawfully publishing their copyrighted content could, with a judge\u2019s signature, demand that ad networks and companies such as PayPal and Visa stop doing business with such sites. Internet service providers would need to prevent Americans from visiting them.\nOn one side of the debate are entities that rely heavily on copyright such as Disney, the Motion Picture Assoication of America and (MPAA) the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). They argue that SOPA prevents piracy and revenue they're entitled to. On the other are giant Internet companies such as Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and eBay as well as Internet freedom organizations, who argue the law threatens to destroy the Internet as we know it. \nBoth sides have been slinging mud at each other since the bill was first introduced in the House this October. But the best dirt (thus far) went flying in the days leading up to the House debate.\n\n\n\n\n\nA pro-SOPA ad from Thursday's Washington Post\nA group of 83 prominent Internet engineers kicked things off on Thursday with a scathing open letter to Congress stating their opposition to both SOPA and its sister Senate bill PIPA. \n\"If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure,\" they wrote.\nA similar sentiment was echoed in a second open letter signed by the likes of Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey, Arianna Huffington and Marc Andreessen. \nGoogle co-founder Sergey Brin, who signed the second letter, followed it up with a Google+ post that compares SOPA to censorship in China, Iran and pre-revolution Libya and Tunisia. Google has hired 15 lobbying firms to fight the bills, according to the New York Times.\nMeanwhile, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales floated the idea of shutting down the site for American visitors in protest of the proposed laws.\nSOPA supporters also had their say on Thursday and during the weeks leading up to the debate.\nThey ran a full-page ad in the Washington Post on Thursday, and earlier in the week ran them in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Last month Viacom, which is engaged in a lengthy legal battle with YouTube over copyright issues, published a seven-minute long video on its website that dramatically spells out why it supports the bills. \n\"It means that maybe the next season of Spongebob won't come back because the people who made it didn't get paid,\" says Nickelodean Senior Director of Digital Marketing Julie Sun at one point in the video. \nShortly later, a \"truth annotated edition\" of the video appeared on YouTube that adds counter-arguments. Embedded below, it provides an overview of a public debate that will likely only intensify.\n\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/12/15/sopa-house-debate/>