The new US legislation SOPA and PIPA, and EU’s ACTA, are allegedly for protecting copyrights. Most people are aware that these laws pose a problem to freedom of speech, but they may not be aware that the laws aren’t about copyrights at all. They're made for the sole purpose of ending freedom of speech on what it was primarily protected for: Criticism of our administrations.
Documented not about copyrights
There are already laws against copyright violations, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act , and they work just fine: The forums can't be held accountable for what people post on them as long as they "promptly remove illegal content when notified of a violation" as the Huffington Post writes on the 2010 Viacom vs. YouTube case. That means that there are already the necessary tools to deal with copyright violations. The problem of dealing with actual copyright violations seems to be that our administrations can't do their job. Sites like Megaupload committed copyright violationson a large scale for years, though the obvious only purpose was making money off exactly that. Would it have been very complex or violated anyone's rights to have shut it down? While there seemed to be no trouble chasing WikiLeaks around, thrown off host after host.
Documented about freedom of speech
Some sites have tried to derail the debate with the little-spin that this will shut down sites like Flickr or Etsy. That's nonsense as the potentially copyrighted material on their sites consist of respectively images, and handmade items sold with photos of them. That means that it's easy to check wether the notice about a violation is correct.
The websites / channels that the new legislation actually causes trouble to are those where claimed copyright violations are in doubt, as copyrighted material can be used lawfully under fair use. Fair use means e.g. that the excerpt is used non-profit, for educational purposes, it’s not a substantial part of the copyrighted work, etc. The sites that will be troubled are therefore those that are dependent on excerpts from mainstream media, such as those that speak out against our administrations' crime or incompetence. It's a well-known fact that a very large part of our mainstream media is owned by members of our administrations or their political / financial backers.
"We'll take your money till you prove yourself innocent!"
What the new laws bring is a set of organized crime like measures for forcing the forums to shut down channels or sites that upsets Big Media: A forum can on a suspicion of not having done enough to stop copyright violations lose its advertizing income immediately. That means that they're guilty untill proven innocent, and till then, they don't get their money.
So, the forums have to think (too) fast when determining wether they should shut down a site or channel that they host, on a complaint from Big Media. Or do you think they'll risk losing their income immediately for a possible 'fair use' ruling later?
