A storm has been brewing in the USA and now its caught the eye of more than a few computer Geeks. Yesterday the US made their first major step forward in a quest to stopping online piracy, they shut down a web site called Megaupload, but it is only the beginnings of their plan to censor the internet of copyrighted material.

The US Senate is currently considering legislation that would hold online organisations, not individuals, responsible for copyright infringement. This could mean that sites like You Tube, Wikipedia, Twitter and even search engines like Google could be sued if copyrighted material was found to be on their site.

The two bills that would give this legal power are "the stop online piracy act" and the "stop IP" bill. If brought in the changes would certainly bring an end to internet culture as we know it, it would make sharing information or opinions much harder and may even effect blogs like this.

There has been severe resistance to the bills, on the 19th of January Wikipedia shut down its English pages in protest and many other popular sites made similar protests. Perhaps more sinisterly the web hacking group Anonymous released a video claiming that if Megaupload was not saved they would shut down many of the internet's most used sites including Facebook and You Tube. They also threatened to hack into some major international banks, but promised not to distribute any account holders information. Anonymous have made many threats in the past, some have not come to fruition. However, they have taken credit for many high profile hacking operations including taking down PayPal in July 11, so make of it what you will.

This is more than likely to be the first of many threats, in this most controversial of topics, from both sides of the argument.