Oakland University students risk losing the ability to use popular social networking sites like Facebook, Youtube and Pinterest due to new house and senate bills that, if passed, will strengthen copyright laws.

In protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Acts, many websites went black on Jan. 18.

According to the Washington Post, Google Inc. has collected over seven million signatures from people in the U.S. as part of their online petition to Congress against the SOPA and PIPA acts.

Google also blacked out its logo on their search engine and the user-created Internet encyclopedia, Wikipedia, among other sites, blacked out their entire U.S. website on Jan. 18.

Instead of seeing the content that a user was looking for, they were directed to a page that explained the bills and provided a link to help the user find their local representative.

According to a statement released from the Wikipedia Foundation, “162 million people experienced the Wikipedia blackout landing page … more than eight million U.S. readers looked up their Congressional representatives through Wikipedia to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act.”

After the protest, 13 congressmen who were co-sponsoring the bill withdrew their support.

Under the SOPA act, which was introduced by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith on Oct. 26, 2011, the U.S. government would have the ability to more closely monitor the Internet.

The goal of the bill would be to crack down on web sites that are allowing their users to illegally obtain copyrighted materials, and intellectual property, which would contain sound recordings, videos of live music performances, and “trafficking in counterfeit labels, goods or services.”

SOPA is directly aimed at various foreign and domestic web sites including “The Pirate Bay,” a torrent website used for downloading.  Besides torrent websites, SOPA would also impact popular social networking sites like Facebook and YouTube.

Under the bill, people would no longer have the right to post videos of concerts, clips of movies or any other piece of material that might be considered theft of intellectual property.

The proposed bill would require online websites and search engines like Google, to “withhold services from an infringing site or prevent users located in the United States from accessing the infringing site.”

SOPA would also focus its energy on eliminating sites that promote illegal medications and sites that distribute prescription drugs to people with out a prescription.

According to opencongress.org, support for the bill has come from NBC Universal, Ford Motor Company, MCA Records, Walmart, Netflix, Disney and others.

The driving force for opposition of SOPA has been many online service providers including Google, Twitter and Facebook among others.

SOPA’s detractors claim that the bill will allow the government to over censor the internet and will destroy what the Internet was created for: sharing information.

PIPA was introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy and outlines many of the same things that are in SOPA.

As of Jan. 20, both SOPA and PIPA have been indefinitely postponed.

In a press release issued after the decision had been made to postponed the voting on the bill, Smith said that the best way to diminish the amount of Internet pirating would be to re-address the issue.

—-Contact senior reporter Christopher Lauritsen via e-mail at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @ChrisLaurtsen