The Stop Online Piracy Act or HR 3261, and its sister bill in the Senate, the Protect IP Act, have been touted as an appropriate response to the problem of intellectual property theft, but the reality is they do very little to effectively hinder piracy and a whole lot to disrupt the rest of the Internet.

Essentially written by lobbyists for the music and movie industries, they would allow copyright holders to seek court orders against any website “or a portion thereof” alleged to have engaged in, enabled or facilitated infringement of copyrighted material.

Put simply: If one of these measures were to pass, it would reshape the Internet as we know it.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, sites like Flickr, Vimeo and YouTube are not held legally liable for hosting infringing content, so long as it’s removed at the request of the copyright holder. SOPA, which has received the majority of attention, would make these sites accountable for any offending material uploaded to their servers. According to Youtube’s press statistics, 48 hours of video are uploaded to its servers every minute; there is just no possible way to vet this volume of content.

The popular social news service Reddit, which allows users to submit content and then vote it “up” or “down,” would be gone overnight, according to its general manager Erik Martin.

There’s a seriously scary provision in both bills, that would require U.S. Internet service providers like AT&T and Comcast to “blacklist,” or block access to sites deemed to have pirated content. This would amount to censorship and, is in fact the very method the Chinese government uses.

Big tech companies are almost unanimously aligned against these bills for good reason: their passage would directly contradict the entrepreneurial spirit that built the Internet, and would stifle the ingenuity that it has fostered.

One of the many false claims proponents of this legislation have put forth is that it would somehow help the economy; they say that much-needed jobs would be salvaged by plugging the leak in the financial hull of entertainment industry. But any gains would be negligible compared to the damage it would cause the much more lucrative tech industry, to say nothing of what it would surely do to start-ups and small businesses.

For instance, were one of these bills to pass, a copyright holder could go after your site for something as trivial as a link someone else posted in the comments section. They could lodge a complaint with Paypal, Visa/Mastercard, or Google Adsense, a program that helps people and small businesses monetize websites. Those services would be given 5 days to comply with the request, that is, choke off financial support to your site.

This is such a ridiculously heavy handed approach to the problem of piracy, that everyone from the Libertarian Cato Institute, to the American Library Association to Wikipedia (which staged a world-wide “blackout” Jan. 18 in protest) has loudly denounced it.

The furor was enough to get the attention of the President, who came out against SOPA. As of Jan. 17, the bill has been removed from the House floor, which is no doubt an encouraging sign.

But there’s still PIPA, which is set to go to vote in the Senate on Jan. 24. Whether or not it passes, make no mistake, the forces behind this legislation are tireless and their pockets are deep.

“We will continue to bring together industry representatives and members to find ways to combat online piracy,” vowed SOPA’s creator Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX)

A recent study conducted by the non-profit watchdog Media Matters, found that despite the sweeping implications of this legislation, and the furious debate surrounding it, the story has been all but ignored by prime-time newscasts.

If we’re going to defeat this draconian legislation, we’ve got to get the message out to everyone we know.

Tell your friends and family to go to americancensorship.org and let their representative know, that this is America not China.