By Collin Lessing and Katy Snyder

Google, Wikipedia and hundreds of other websites have shut down today in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) legislation in the U.S. Senate, bills that aim to curb Internet piracy and copyright infringement by no longer allowing U.S. companies to sell ads to pirates or process payments for illegal online sales. Under this legislation, U.S.-based search-engines would be forced to remove suspected pirates from their search results. And according to a Huffington Post article, a website accused of copyright infringement could be shut down with “neither a trial nor a traditional court hearing.”

In response to the possible legislation, numerous websites have shut down or “blacked” out their sites today in protest. Wikipedia officially shutdown its English-language site at midnight last night for 24 hours. In a statement, Wikipedia said these bills, if passed would “be devastating to the free and open web” and “…will harm the free and open Internet and bring about new tools for censorship of international websites inside the United States.” Click here to read more about websites who have joined the strike.

We were curious to find out what the implications of SOPA and PIPA might be for the nonprofit sector. The Huffington Post points out that the blocking suspicious sites’ DNS servers (the place where URL addresses entered into web browsers are translated into IP addresses and ultimately connect Internet users to websites) may have unintended consequences for nonprofits’ donation processes because interfering with DNS servers may make a site more vulnerable to identity theft and cyber-attacks. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar recently announced that DNS blocking will be removed from the legislation.

SOPA and PIPA may also have implications for nonprofit organizations like public libraries. Three major library associations—the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Association of Research Libraries wrote a letter to Chairman Lamar Smith saying, “In this environment, the criminal prosecution of a library for copyright infringement is no longer beyond the realm of possibility,” and identified certain sections of SOPA that could be amended to avoid this.

With SOPA hearings delayed until February, we would like to ask our Nonprofit Street readers, how do you see SOPA and PIPA affecting the nonprofit sector? Do you have any concerns? Did you block your website today in protest? Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.