Ars Technica is running a great story on a not so great piece of legislation that if passed, would probably make the internet a bad place for Americans:http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/house-takes-senates-bad-internet-censorship-bill-makes-it-worse.ars
In essence what it does is try to erect black lists closing off parts of the internet. Yes, people have been trying to censor things on the internet for a long time, but not always with such government sponsorship. According to the article: The bill gives government lawyers the power to go to court and obtain an injunction against any foreign website based on a generally single-sided presentation to a judge. Once that happens, Internet providers have 5 days to “prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site.”
I can not help but feel that this would cause an insane amount of abuse, with no way for people to defend themselves. It’s not hard to imagine the comparison to China’s Great Firewall, both are controlled by the government and deployed with the sole interest of restricting access to the outside internet.
You can read more about this bill here: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/the-borderless-internet-is-officially-dead.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
UPDATE: The EFF has published a 3 part series on the Stop Online Piracy Act
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/disastrous-ip-legislation-back-–-and-it’s-worse-ever
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/sopa-hollywood-finally-gets-chance-break-internet
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/11/hollywood-new-war-on-software-freedom-and-internet-innovation
RIT Cyber Security Policy and Law Class Blog 
I honestly think this is a silly effort. No matter how hard people try to stop piracy its going to keep happening. It has continued to happen on all levels of media from vhs tapes, cds, dvds, mp3 now even into e-books etc. it will continue to happen.