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So, we've shot down SOPA and PIPA. Congratulations Internets for a job well done. Mission accomplished, right? Not so much. While that's two bad pieces of legislation pushed back, there's much more where that came from. Leaving aside existing nastiness like the DMCA, we also have the even nastier Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) (PDF). How bad is it? Bad enough that the European Parliament's rapporteur for ACTA (Kader Arif) resigned over it today (January 27, 2012). Unfortunately for those of us in the United States, President Obama has already ratified ACTA on behalf of the United States.

Dan Rowinski publishes an easy to understand explanation of SOPA. Joe Brockmeier wishes Americans were always so tuned in to their elected representatives' doings. A Google contractor is caught vandalizing Open Street Map. All of this and more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.

After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is delaying Tuesday's scheduled Senate vote on the controversial Protect IP Act.

The move, as well as a similar delay on a vote of a companion bill before the House of Representatives, appears to be the clearest indication yet that Wednesday's Wikipedia blackout and Web protest swayed lawmakers. On Thursday, several lawmakers dropped their support of the controversial measure and all four Republican presidential candidates took stands against it.

The four leading presidential candidates voiced opposition to the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP Acts in a televised debate Thursday. The most forceful stance may have come from frontrunner Mitt Romney, who called the bill written by one of his key backers a threat to freedom of speech.

"The truth of the matter is the law as written is far too intrusive, far too expansive," Romney said. "It would have a depressing impact on one of the fastest growing industries... I'm standing for freedom."

Wikipedia blacked out its English-language site yesterday along with other major websites. It was a protest against Web censorship and a demonstration of its effects. Wikipedia's participation was a big win for the movement opposing SOPA/PIPA, the twin anti-piracy bills in Congress. Wikipedia is a resource millions use every day and most take for granted. It's the fifth most popular website in the world.

Wikimedia Foundation says the blackout reached 162 million people. Of those, 8 million used Wikipedia's tool to look up their congressional representatives. The blackout generated three trending Twitter topics when it started at midnight Eastern Time on Wednesday. Twitter also revealed frustration and lack of understanding of the blackout. But this was all by design. Censorship is frustrating. Wikipedians wanted a campaign that was both symbolic and effective, and that's what its staff delivered.

Twenty-four hours after an Internet-wide protest against controversial anti-piracy legislation, big media and pro-copyright interests won a major victory with the shutdown of Megaupload and related websites. The company's flagship file-sharing site allowed users to upload files and share them via a unique URL. The service, which garnered several million visitors per month, was frequently used to share pirated music, movies, software and other copyrighted media.

While the site's owners long argued that they were legally protected by the "safe harbor" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), federal authorities in the United States evidently saw things differently and have arrested four people connected to Megaupload and charged them with online piracy. Three other people are still at large.

Yesterday Internet users across the United States rushed to their keyboards, sat up straight, and starred menacingly into their computer screens while silently saying in their heads: "Take that, Internet censorship!" Then they hit ENTER nearly 8 million times on petitions to help stop SOPA/PIPA. Internet giants Reddit, Wikipedia and Craigslist joined in the protests by going dark for an entire day. The bill caught the attention of mainstream media sources, even dominating the New York Times' homepage. Nineteen senators now oppose PIPA, including seven who formerly co-sponsored the bill. OpenCongress's Protect IP Act Senate whip count currently shows 33 senators supporting PIPA, and 39 opposing it.

Yesterday Internet users across the United States rushed to their keyboards, sat up straight, and starred menacingly into their computer screens while silently saying in their heads: "Take that, Internet censorship!" Then they hit ENTER nearly 8 million times on petitions to help stop SOPA/PIPA. Internet giants Reddit, Wikipedia and Craigslist joined in the protests by going dark for an entire day. The bill caught the attention of mainstream media sources, even dominating the New York Times' homepage. Nineteen senators now oppose PIPA, including seven who formerly co-sponsored the bill. OpenCongress's Protect IP Act Senate whip count currently shows 33 senators supporting PIPA, and 39 opposing it.

The Socially Aware blog has put together a nice infographic that highlights several key decisions in social media case law, starting with the Sony v. Universal Supreme Court Betamax recording decision of 1984 and continuing to the more recent past. In light of the SOPA and PIPA protests and discussions of this week, I found the review enlightening and interesting to see how far we have gone in terms of legislating copyright violations and other digital misdeeds. Remember Facebook suing and ultimately crushing Power.com? How about Courtney Love's Tweet that supposedly defamed a fashion designer?

So what just happened? Well, several of the world's most prominent Web destinations interrupted their regular programming to remind their readers of the dangers of a world where certain content may be arbitrarily made to disappear. For most Americans, this was probably the first they'd seen of any efforts by Congress to change the Internet, for whatever reason they'd want to do so.

They were given links to click on to learn more. Some of those links led to the White House Web site, where over a hundred thousand people signed petitions urging the President to veto any bill that would suborn Internet censorship. A few of those links led, to our own surprise, to ReadWriteWeb; and for a few hours yesterday, our traffic rose to unprecedented levels.