OPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Acts) are two coordinated anti-piracy bills working its way through Congress that would grant content creators extraordinary power over the internet. Either bills aim to curb online copyright infringement, or the use or access of illegal copies of movies and music files without permission of its owners.

Recently, Wikipedia, Reddit and Google blackout sites to protest SOPA. They have reportedly united with legal experts across the country in opposition to the bills, which they say could severely hamper or even censor the freedom of expression.

Here’s what the government can do to foreign websites under even the narrowest reading of SOPA section 102 and PIPA section 3.

• Order internet service providers to alter their DNS servers from resolving the domain names of websites in foreign countries that host illegal copies of videos, songs, and photos.

• Order search engines like Google to modify search results to exclude foreign websites that host illegally copied material.

• Order payment providers like PayPal to shut down the payment accounts of foreign websites that host illegally copied material.

• Order ad services like Google’s AdSense to refuse any ads or payment from foreign sites that host illegally copied content.

Note: These rules don’t apply to domains that end in .com, .net, and .org, which fall under USlaw.


Influence to Jailbreak

If SOPA/PIPA anti-piracy bill make its way through Congress, jailbreak software such as Redsn0w, PwnageTool, Greenpois0n, Sn0wbreeze et cetera will be deemed illegal to distribute. If that happens, no site will be allowed to post iOS jailbreaking tutorials; software that corroborate jailbreaking. Eventually hackers would stop developing, updating and distributing tools. End result – No future jailbreak or iPhone Unlock.



Lead hacker P0sixNinja of Chronic Dev Team tweeted that SOPA will adversely affect the jailbreaking community and if passed jailbreaking would cease to exist as it would become illegal under SOPA, even though the US Government made jailbreaking legal back in 2010.


Why is Jailbreaking illegal under SOPA?

The distribution of jailbreak software could be deemed illegal because it contains Apple’s IP and that jailbroken iPhones depend on modified versions of Apple’s bootloader and operating system software.


What you should do to stop SOPA/PIPA?

If you are living in the United States of America, you can call or email your respective congressmen. If you’re not a U.S. Citizen visit Stop Stop American Censorship and take at least one of the actions they recommend.