SOPA/PIPA, Fried Mexican Dessert or the End of the Internet?

Well if you have been trying to surf the web today, you may have noticed that some sites like Wikipedia and Reddit have "gone dark" today in protest of the bills S.O.P.A. and P.I.P.A. which are currently in Congress right now.  So the question is, what is SOPA and PIPA?

House Judiciary Committee Chair and Texas Republican Lamar Smith, along with 12 co-sponsors, introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act, or H.R. 3261, as it's formally known, on October 26th of last year.  Its counterpart in the Senate is the Protect IP Act (S. 968). Also known as PIPA. There will likely be a vote on PIPA next Wednesday; SOPA discussions had been placed on hold but will resume in February of this year.

These bills are designed to stop websites overseas from putting up copyrighted material, such as movies and other videos, and making them available to download for free.

This sounds like a sensible idea, but it could have a major impact on the entire nature of how the internet works.  It's even reasonable to say that sites like Facebook and Twitter could remove your tweets and status updates if they don't find them agreeable.

More questions to this situation can be answered by checking out this FAQ about SOPA/PIPA.

Read more about it, and then let us know what you think!  Personally, I don't know how to feel about this.  I agree with some of it, but then again, it does seem like scheme plotted by Mr. Burns