SOPA and The Jailbreak Community

Recently, The internet has been fussing about SOPA “Stop Online Piracy Act” bill. And we have seen Google, Wikipedia and Reddit protesting the bill which has been initially introduced by U.S. Representative Lamar S. Smith (R-TX) and currently making it’s way through Congress. As The markup of the Stop Online Piracy Act is expected to resume in February. So, What SOPA Means for Jailbreakers?

 The whole purpose of SOPA as Lamar introduced it is to expand the expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods.

However, To clarify the matter even more here’s what Brian Barret of Gizmodo wrote on the matter explaining in detail how this SOPA bill works.

How Does SOPA Works?

“The beating heart of SOPA is the ability of intellectual property owners (read: movie studios and record labels) to effectively pull the plug on foreign sites against whom they have a copyright claim. If Warner Bros., for example, says that a site in Italy is torrenting a copy of The Dark Knight, the studio could demand that Google remove that site from its search results, that PayPal no longer accept payments to or from that site, that ad services pull all ads and finances from it, and —most dangerously—that the site’s ISP prevent people from even going there. Perhaps the most galling thing about SOPA in its original construction is that it let IP owners take these actions without a single court appearance or judicial sign-off. All it required was a single letter claiming a “good faith belief” that the target site has infringed on its content.”

SOPA and The Jailbreakers

And now after you have had an image about the SOPA bill,  Here is what this bill means for the Jailbreakers. Joshua Hill AKA p0sixninja of the Chronic Dev Team have explained that although the jailbreaking process has been declared legal in 2010. SOPA will make  The distribution of the jailbreaking tools and software illegal as it contains Apple’s [reversed-engineered] IP. Which means that the websites hosting the software is one phone call away from being shut down if Apple wants to.

What can you do?

Well, as we said the markup of the bill is expected to resume in February. So, If you live in the US, call or email your respective congressmen. and help spread the word “STOP SOPA”