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What is SOPA? Is a is a controversial bill that was introduced in the United States House of Representatives in October 2011, in order to stop the websites outside US sell counterfeit goods and violate copyrighted intellectual property regulations. These kind of websites are producing losses of billion of dollars for the USA-based companies.

But isn’t this a good thing? Why are so many protesting against SOPA? Because they believe that this attempt to stop online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods makes more harm than good. Many are afraid that SOPA will offer the copyright owners to much power against the websites alleged to contribute to online piracy or selling counterfeit goods.

Basically, if this bill passes it would allow any copyright owner to sue the websites that are accused of braking the intellectual property laws. Under the protection of SOPA, the copyright owners would be able to constrain providers like MasterCard and PayPal to stop providing their services to certain websites, suspected of online piracy acts. In the same tame, the companies might ban the advertise networks from providing their services on the respective websites.

Sources on the market say that Google ,Facebook, Twitter, Paypal, Yahoo! and Wikipedia have entered discussions to coordinately shut down their websites to protest against the potential harmful effects SOPA could have over the Internet – a protest action already called in the international press as “nuclear.”

Although the online Giants like Google, Facebook or Twitter haven’t officially confirmed the shut down, the news sharing website, Reddit, already said that they will go offline for 12 hours on January 18th to protest against SOPA. Wikipedia Co-founder, Jimmy Wales, that his company will also take such actions against the SOPA threat, and that they will try to coordinate their actions with Reddit. Mozilla is also on the list of companies that are protesting against SOPA and Anonymous (the famous hackers group) proposed that all the websites that are against SOPA should post an anti-SOPA message instead of their regular content.

It looks like the negative media feed-back, corroborated with the recently signed petition on White House’s “we the people” site have finally made Obama administration have second thoughts about adopting this bill. In a response to the petition that asked the US president to veto SOPA it reached his desk, White House officials said that the Obama administration “will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”

Even though there is no sign of an official statement guaranteeing that SOPA bill will not pass, this sounds like good news and the online communities protesting against SOPA will sure be glad to see the results of their actions.

If Google solely goes blackouts for a few hours, then the whole Internet would rumble about it, but if the actions are coordinated (which is a bit hard to imagine), and the access to Facebook, Yahoo! and Twitter blackout simultaneously, would take the anti-SOPA actions to a level never seen in the history of the Internet.