The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a United States bill introduced by U.S. Representative Lamar S. Smith (R-TX) to expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. Provisions include the requesting of court orders to bar advertising networks and payment facilities from conducting business with infringing websites, and search engines from linking to the sites, and court orders requiring Internet service providers to block access to the sites. The law would expand existing criminal laws to include unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content, imposing a maximum penalty of five years in prison. A similar bill in the U.S. Senate is titled the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).

Proponents of the legislation state it will protect the intellectual-property market and corresponding industry, jobs and revenue, and is necessary to bolster enforcement of copyright laws, especially against foreign websites. Claiming flaws in present laws that do not cover foreign-owned and operated sites, and citing examples of "active promotion of rogue websites" by U.S. search engines, proponents assert stronger enforcement tools are needed.

Piracy Act is a stock short title used for legislation in the United Kingdom relating to piracy.

The Bill for an Act with this short title may have been known as a Piracy Bill during its passage through Parliament.

List of short titles

Aaron Swartz (born November 8, 1986) is an American programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist. He is best known in programming circles for co-authoring the RSS 1.0 specification. He received mainstream media attention after his federal indictment and arrest on 19 July 2011, for allegedly harvesting academic journal articles from JSTOR.

Swartz is the co-founder of Demand Progress and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Swartz was active in discussions of Internet standards from an early age, and co-authored the specification for RSS by the time he was 14.^{[citation needed]} Since then he has been a member of the W3C's RDF Core Working Group, co-designed the formatting language Markdown with John Gruber, and worked on many other projects.

Swartz attended Stanford University for a year, leaving to start the software company Infogami, a startup that was funded by Y Combinator's first Summer Founders Program. Infogami was built around a wiki backend, a subject of interest for Swartz since his early effort to develop theinfo, a wiki-based encyclopedia, in 2000.

Melvin Luther (Mel) Watt (born August 26, 1945) is a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives. He has served North Carolina's 12th congressional district since 1993. An attorney from Charlotte, North Carolina, Watt previously served one term as a state Senator and served as campaign manager for former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt.

Watt was born in Steele Creek, located in Mecklenburg County, and is a graduate of York Road High School in Charlotte. He was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1967 with a BS degree in Business Administration. In 1970, he received a JD degree from Yale University Law School and was a published member of the Yale Law Journal.

Watt practiced law from 1970 to 1992, specializing in minority business and economic development law.^{[citation needed]} He has been a partner in several small businesses.

Watt was the campaign manager of Harvey Gantt's campaigns for Mayor of Charlotte and for the United States Senate election in North Carolina, 1990. Watt served one term in the North Carolina Senate (1985–86).