If you haven’t been keeping up with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), it’s time to get informed. This issue of the Hawkeye has a pretty straightforward explanation of what these bills are intended to do versus what they actually will do.

I was thrilled to see the protests online Wednesday. What could possibly be more poetic than a major source of our information (Wikipedia… Admit it, you use it more than you should!) making information no longer accessible? This would be exactly what would happen if these bills passed.

However small the protest may seem on a global scale, it’s good to know that websites like Wikipedia, Reddit and even the LOL Cats are taking a stand in protecting our right to access information.

Personally, I can completely understand the desire to protect intellectual property. Just imagine how angry you would be if you wrote a book or composed a song and you didn’t receive a penny in compensation for it although everyone else was using it. As a mass communications student, both creativity and free speech are essential to everything I strive for in the realm of journalism. I can see the issue of wanting to protect others’ creativity, as well as the need to let freethinking and expression flourish. Despite my understanding of these two conflicting topics, I strongly feel as though censoring the Internet is wrong.

As a country that fights to protect our freedom of expression, I think that it would be extremely contradictory for the U.S. to quell information that is available to its citizens. There are already laws in place that protect copyrighted material. So why do lawmakers feel the need to take this issue up a notch?

Although these bills are trying to combat a loss of profit for Hollywood, I think that often exposure to copyrighted material via the Internet has actually helped album and film sales. I rarely hear music that interests me played on the radio, so I am exposed to a lot of music online. If I didn’t hear it there, I would never think to purchase the album. Thus, the Internet plays a direct role in influencing some of my purchases.

I don’t have a definite answer for how to fight copyright infringement, but I do know that SOPA and PIPA are far from being a solution to the problem.