Legislation has been debating about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Address Act (PIPA) in the Senate. These acts are claiming that they will put an end to plagiarism. Republicans stand together and oppose the SOPA act. The SOPA and PIPA bills could possibly stop job creation and harmfully impact the economy even more. Copyrights are already in place to protect creators’ rights. Jamie Villarreal (12) says, “Plagiarism is bad and people should think of their own ideas.” Instead of creating a possibly harmful new law, the owner should just sue if someone is stealing their creation under the existing laws already in place. In order to protest the bills, major websites participated in cyberspaces’ first blackout. Jake Ice (12) says,”The blackout was effective, because it shows people that Wikipedia is a plagiarized website.” Websites like Wikipedia and Google protested the SOPA bill Jan. 18. Wikipedia’s website shut down and Google posted a banner that censored their website for 24 hours. All of the websites involved in the blackout organized petitions that successfully got enough signatures to get senators and other government officials to change their opinion about the SOPA/ PETA bills. Thirty-five Senators went public about their opposition to PIPA since the blackout. Last week there was only five. Congress has to at least get 41 people opposing PIPA and SOPA in the Senate so the bills will be dropped. If the PIPA and SOPA bills pass, the government will be given more power among Internet providers to block and sue websites that have anything to do with copyright infringements of their own or advertisement of other websites. The government will have the ability to force search engines or any other providers from having any contact with infringed websites by cutting off websites that break copyright policies. These laws will provide the most dramatic form of censorship for Americans that may even lead to years of jail time for people who have streamed copyrighted music. Kailey Kaiser (12) says, “The Internet is used for so much more than just research papers, and with these bills it is only targeting the lazy high schoolers who don’t want to put in the effort to learn something about a subject.”