Since the mid-1990s, the internet has become an important part of our culture. It can be used to meet a friend you haven’t seen in years, to start a new business, or to express your view on income taxes. In short, the internet can be used for almost anything and everything. There is nothing on par with such freedom of expression.

However, all of this is going to be destroyed by a dangerously misguided bill called SOPA.

SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act is mainly aimed at preventing copyright infringement. Unfortunately, it will not. A main part of the bill requires search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing to withhold “services from an infringing site or preventing users located in the United States from accessing the infringing site,” in addition to blocking the Domain Name System (DNS) to the site, which prevents normal access, thus preventing piracy. However, while the site’s DNS is blocked, pirates can still easily access blocked sites through other means, such as entering the IP address of the site.

What this bill will do is seriously inhibit the rights of citizens around the world. A huge problem with the bill is that if just one post on a site has copyrighted material, the entire host site could be shut down, and the user who posts the material could face five years in jail. What lawmakers don’t understand is the sheer amount of infringing material out there being uploaded every second. On Youtube alone there is an average of 20 hours of video uploaded per minute. Any measures taken to regulate this will be ineffective; there simply is no way that people can remove all copyrighted materials from the internet.

In short, this bill will take the rights away from the citizens, all in the name of ineffective anti-piracy policy.  How can the government justify not letting us access and use certain websites just because it holds any copyrighted material? Congress must reevaluate its methods for dealing with piracy, without trampling over the people.