Though American both the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act allow American special interest groups to impose their interpretations of United States copyright law on foreign nationals and foreign businesses located outside of the United States.

As Canadians we should be concerned because we have different laws in regards to Copyright and we’re in the middle of reforming our copyright act.

Works are made available to Canadians in the public domain two decades before these same works are made available to Americans and Europeans so if I were to publish Ernest Hemingway‘s works on this site, for example, I could be subjected to litigation by his American publishers.

Though legal to publish in Canada, his works could have my site removed from the American search engines and cause my site to loose affiliations and funding from American companies and individual American donators. And it doesn’t appear to matter that my site is hosted in Canada because the American copyright lobby have laid claim to the .com domain in the TVShack case.

When British citizens are subjected to extradition over linking to copyrighted material, a legal act within the United Kingdom, it is obvious that restraint would not happen after the passing of this legislation. And I have in the past inadvertently linked copyrighted material.

I have had requests for links that sounded legitimate but were not. And nothing stops an illegitimate profiteer from buying a legitimate site or domain that I’ve linked in the past, without my knowledge.

I do my best to clean up my listings. But people could also spam this site, an illegal act in Canada, yet I could still be subjected to the SOPA condoned retribution. The legislation is that dangerously vague.

Yes, there are sites in Russia and China that blatantly violate copyright but SOPA is a slippery slope.