Copyright laws exist to protect the rights of authors, musicians and other content creators to make profit from their work. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution exists in order to protect the people from censorship. There are two bills currently before Congress that could have the effect of using the former to defeat the latter.
These two pieces of legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, could be used to limit access to foreign websites from inside the U.S. if the Justice Department determines any part of the site is infringing on U.S. copyrights.
The problem is that these acts will block any content generated on an offending site, not just the content that triggers the action. This means that an act, which states its purpose  is “to promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property,” could actually limit the distribution of other people’s creative work.
The question boils down to this: Does the right of content producers and the companies they sell their rights to make a profit or outweigh the right of the public to have access to entertainment and information.
A primary target of these acts will be a site outside the U.S. that streams television shows, which the legal distributors choose not to provide on streaming services. So what these acts protect is companies’ rights to do something they have chosen not to do. If they were willing to put out the energy to make the shows available to the public they will be able to compete against these pirate providers by providing a legal and reasonable way to view the content.
Since this law is under consideration it is obvious  the argument that there is not a market for these programs to be streamed is invalid. If there are enough sites providing the service that they need to be regulated then there is enough of a market to provide the content in an ad-supported model legitimately.
However the poor wording has created concern. If passed these laws will be used to do more than just make sure you only watch “American Horror Story” when FX says it is OK to. These laws give the Justice Department a powerful tool to cut off access to any website that the government does not want Americans seeing.
Will these laws be used for this purpose? There is no way to know. I like to think not, but the possibility of abuse is reason enough to stand against them. Beyond the ability to restrict information, these laws send an isolationist message. In effect, it gives the government the power to close our digital borders.
Which is far from the original intent of copyright law. The Statute of Anne is often cited  as the first copyright laws and was written to encourage writers to produce new works. Prior to this statute the ownership of an author’s work belonged to the publisher who bought it from them. The Statute of Anne guaranteed the author the right to profit from their works 14 years after its  publication.
Today we have a set of laws that provide protection for the author for their entire lifetime plus an additional 50 years. Laws which were intended to encourage the creation of new works to enrich the public are now tools that allow authors to continue to milk the goats of their youth into old age.
Now those laws are being turned into a pair of blinders that can be used to filter the flow of information into the country. if congress passes these bills they are, as the internet says “doing it wrong”