By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor

If the acronyms SOPA or PIPA meant nothing to you before this week, the blackouts of popular online sites might have brought you up to speed. Wikipedia and Reddit hosted blackouts site wide on Jan. 18 in protest of the proposed legislation in both the Senate and U.S. House of Representatives.

As captured in this Business 2 Business piece, the protest obviously got the right people’s attention because both pieces of proposed law were withdrawn about 24 hours later. With Wikipedia being the sixth most visited website in the entire world, the blackout of its site caused some attention.

Google (News - Alert), to show its protest of SOPA and PIPA placed a blackout banner on its “Google” moniker but users were still able to take advantage of the popular search engine’s services.

So what are SOPA and PIPA and why did this legislation spark such outrage in the Internet community? SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) was initiated in the House and partnered with the Senate’s bill, PIPA (Protect IP Act). Had the bills passed, the Internet as we know it would have been a very different world.

The two bills were drafted in an effort to crack down on those pirating websites and filling them with copyrighted content. But that’s where there is a gray area. According to the bill, the description of what classifies as “intellectual property infringement” isn’t very clear and could possibly include memos or even karaoke videos on YouTube (News - Alert) posted in poor taste.

Taking it a step further, sites would no longer be protected under the Safe Harbor provision established in 1998 under the DMCA. This Act kept sites from being liable for poster’s content on its site. This safety net has kept websites like YouTube in business. Regardless of the content, the fault lies with the person who posted the material and not the site itself.

 Under SOPA and PIPA, this would go away and sites could be found hosting copyrighted material and liable for the action or forced to take it down. Adworks, an online advertising network, could be disabled, PayPal (News - Alert) would be banned from working with you and even search engines can be forced to remove links to those sites.

The entire process is a slippery slope toward censorship. Some of the most prominent Internet sites have come out against SOPA and PIPA. Google, Mozilla, Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (News - Alert) and Zynga all feel it could have put an end to creativity and even free speech.

For those of us creating content with the use of a virtual office, we could easily land on both sides. We want our content protected, but we also know the value of using additional content to enhance a brand. In the online world, this often works to the benefit of both parties. True piracy is likely to continue, regardless of any legislation handed down. Those using the Internet for its intended purposes still respect the intellectual property of others.