How Stuff Works: How SOPA Works

Piracy — and more specifically the threat of foreign sites hosting pirated material — is the primary focus of a piece of United States legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Representative Lamar Smith from Texas introduced SOPA, also known as H.R. 3261, to the United States House of Representatives on Oct. 26, 2011. According to the language in the act, its purpose is to “promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes.”

When you dig into the language of the act, you’ll find that the goal is to target sites that exist on computers in countries outside the United States. Because these sites — and the people who run them — are outside the jurisdiction of U.S. law, the act aims to hinder or shut down pirate sites in an indirect way. The proposed rules set out by the act are controversial — several companies and Internet experts have objected to the material in the act and some go so far as to say it could break the Internet.