It appears that a cold war is brewing on the internet. Companies and sectors of the business world are starting to align and the two sides are starting to flex their muscles. H.R. 3261, otherwise known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), has certainly engendered some harsh feelings since its introduction. 

Most online based companies feel as though SOPA would harm the Internet in a way that it couldn’t bounce back from. Some sites, such as Wikipedia are so upset over the fact that this bill might pass that they are threatening to leave before they are forced out.

At the heart of the angst is language in the bill that would basically allow one site to shut a competitor down simply by accusing the other of having copyrighted material. SOPA falls well short of including a mechanism that would safeguard against companies running rampant against anyone they dislike. What makes enemies of SOPA even more outraged is that the members of Congress that are discussing the bill do not seem to understand or care about the negative unintended consequences the bill has.

What really frustrates those who are aligned against SOPA is that they feel the companies that do support the bill should know better. SOPA was originally introduced as a way to stop the record and movie industries from having their content copied without buying a copyright, but the bill does far more than that. 

While the usual movie and music companies are listed as advocates, there are plenty of organizations that are a bit of a surprise.

While the bill has been delayed in committee until 2012, several SOPA haters have started looking at who is supporting the bill and started talking about boycotts of companies like domain provider GoDaddy. YCombinator founder Paul Graham is going one step further. Graham believes that any company on this list does not deserve an invite to his company’s well known YC Demo Day. Graham posted his announcement on the site Hacker News:

“Several of those companies send people to Demo Day, and when I saw the list I thought: we should stop inviting them. So yes, we’ll remove anyone from those companies from the Demo Day invite list.”

Graham followed that posting up with confirmation that he had told the people who are in charge of issuing the invites that no company on the list of supporters should be invited to the next Demo Day, scheduled for March 27th, 2012. Graham added, “I don’t know exactly which companies had people on the list. But I know which will now: none of them.”