Ordinary citizens and civil rights groups are coming out against SOPA with the hearings have started on Capitol Hill. In case you’ve missed it, SOPA intends to change the internet as we know it, blacklisting hundreds of thousands of websites, with more to be added simply by someone saying they think the site isn’t legitimate.

The ACLU has issued a strong statement against SOPA, which gets to the heart of why this piece of terrible legislation should not pass.

Even more to the point, the mere existence of infringing content online does not justify the removal of non-infringing content in the course of attempting to rid the internet of the former. These established principles should not change or be treated differently just because technology has changed.

The potential for impact on non-infringing content is exponentially greater under SOPA than under other versions of this bill. As such, despite our support for the protection of the legitimate copyright interests of online content producers, we cannot support SOPA, and in fact we oppose it in its current form, given its broad sweep and its heavy hand that will land largely upon innocent content producers.

What many people don’t understand is that SOPA won’t just affect websites that are deemed to have some sort of infringing content, it will affect vast other news and services that we use every day on the internet.

The wording of the law is so vague that legitimate sites, such as Canadian pharmacies, are also in the cross-hairs to be labeled as a rogue website.

If you play video games, you are also not exempt from being caught in this legislation.

Just as people post cute pictures and videos of themselves, their pets and their kids singing and dancing to copyrighted works, gamers of all ages routinely post pics and stream video of themselves during game play. All of these things have, for the most part, been considered “fair use” under the law. Tens of thousands of videos currently available online featuring game play from popular games like Call of Duty, Halo, Starcraft and others could be made illegal under these laws.

Since games also rely on the unique and fresh content that gamers create structurally and within game play, SOPA/PROTECT IP would freeze such innovation. Creative new works developed out of the technology of video games could be stifled by these new laws. Machinima, or videos created using in-game tools such as in Red vs. Blue, may never have come about if SOPA/PROTECT IP were in place.

SOPA will eliminate fair use, due process, and stifle any innovation that is not strictly regulated by a few in power that will give authority to do so. YouTube will see massive videos being flagged simply because a person shows a clip from a video game.

If you write things such as fan fiction, this, too, could run afoul of the new laws because you are would no longer be granted the right to create fan fiction because you do not own the copyrights to the characters or settings.

Canadians are also finding that they will likely be subjected to SOPA should it pass because the censorship terms are too broad.

It defines “domestic Internet Protocol addresses” — the numeric strings that constitute the actual address of a website or Internet connection — as “an Internet Protocol address for which the corresponding Internet Protocol allocation entity is located within a judicial district of the United States.”

Yet IP addresses are allocated by regional organizations, not national ones. The allocation entity located in the U.S. is called ARIN, the Americas Registry for Internet Numbers. Its territory includes the U.S., Canada and 20 Caribbean nations. This bill treats all IP addresses in this region as domestic for U.S. law purposes.

To put this in context, every Canadian Internet provider relies on ARIN for its block of IP addresses. In fact, ARIN even allocates the block of IP addresses used by federal and provincial governments. The U.S. bill would treat them all as domestic for U.S. law purposes.

As of right now, computers can still reroute their DNS settings to ones of their own choosing, thus Canadians, and anyone else who can do a basic google search, could easily circumvent the censorship. The time is now to write to Congress and get this stopped before it becomes a law. Once that happens, the law will be abused and it might just be your favorite website that’s caught in the middle.

So far, more than 700,000 responses have been sent to Congress and they have been overwhelmed by the number of emails sent in the last week, all of them stating that they are against SOPA. If you haven’t sent in a letter, please take the time to do so. Ordinary citizens need to keep up the fight, especially considering that the SOPA hearings are packed with pro-SOPA speakers.

For the best, and most up to date, information regarding SOPA, I highly recommend reading Techdirt. They have a wealth of pertinent and informative articles for you to read and have the staff to keep everyone aware of changes as they happen.