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The Internet is in an uproar over the Stop Online Piracy Act. The battles lines are drawn. Big Media (the record labels, movie studios and TV networks) support the bill while Big Tech (search engines, open source platforms, social networks) oppose it. The bill, introduced to Congress by Representative Lamar Smith, is ostensibly supposed to give the Attorney General the ability to eliminate Internet piracy and to "protect U.S. customers and prevent U.S. support of infringing sites."

There is a lot that may be wrong with SOPA, but putting the power to censor the Internet into the hands of the government is chief among citizens' concerns. The law would force Internet Service Providers and search engines to cut off access to infringing sites as well as give the government the ability to stop payment to those sites. How would SOPA work? What do you need to know about the bill heading into 2012? We take a deep dive into everything you need to know below.

The list of companies that support the controversial piece of U.S. legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is fairly predictable. It includes huge media conglomerates, music industry groups, pharmaceutical companies and the like. One name that stands out, however, is that of domain name registrar GoDaddy. Whereas many of the big Web technology companies have come out in opposition to SOPA, GoDaddy enthusiastically supports the proposed law.

Not unsurprisingly, this news does not sit well with many of the Internet's most vocal SOPA opponents, especially on Reddit. A thread that popped up on the site today decries GoDaddy's support for SOPA and encourages users to transfer their domains to another provider. The conversation, which has more than a few choice words for GoDaddy, has grown quite long.

There is already a well-functioning administrative body for handling intellectual property disputes between U.S.-based companies and parties in foreign countries. It's the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC), and if you've followed the many disputes brought by Apple against mobile phone makers, by mobile phone makers against Apple, and among IP portfolio holders such as Qualcomm and Broadcom, no doubt you've heard of USITC.

So why didn't Congress consider the Commission as a solution for the burning problem of resolving piracy matters with unknown parties outside U.S. borders? That's a question being asked, and possibly even answered, by an alternative bill introduced last week to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP bills in the House and Senate, respectively. This morning, a cavalcade of leading tech companies known to oppose SOPA already have signed on as supporters of the USITC-based alternative.

The U.S. International Trade Commission would be the court of first instance for disputes brought by parties claiming that a Web site hosted offshore is trafficking in its intellectual property, in a draft of a bi-partisan bill released today by Sen. Ron Wyden (D - Ore.) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R - Calif.). The Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade bill (whose acronym is somehow "OPEN") is being offered as an alternative to the PROTECT-IP anti-piracy legislation which passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last May, but which has yet to come to a vote of the full Senate. The bill's House counterpart, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), is currently being debated by representatives.

USITC is already the principal court for resolving intellectual property disputes between American and foreign companies, so certainly no one yet can fault the bill lack of precedent.

Last Wednesday, ReadWriteWeb published a legal analysis of the Stop Online Piracy Act and its Senate Counterpart, the PROTECT-IP bill. Our story prompted a spirited, logical, and largely rational debate between e-novel author Rowena Cherry, who supports the legislation, and TechDirt founder Michael Masnick, who opposes it.

I've been on record as saying that we as a society have forgotten how to debate. These two have not. While they may not always have been as strictly civil with one another as Lincoln and Douglas, they both demonstrated some lessons that both opponents and supporters of the bill may perhaps put to good use:

The opposition to this year's round of anti-piracy bills in Congress - the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, and the PROTECT-IP Act in the Senate - centers around the idea that the intention of such a law would be to facilitate government censorship. Such opposition reached its peak last week, during online rallies organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others, on what was called "American Censorship Day."

At the request of this reporter, Hillel I. Parness, a practicing attorney and partner with the New York-based firm of Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi, and also adjunct member of the IP faculty at Columbia University School of Law, conducted a study of the current state of both bills this week. As Parness told ReadWriteWeb today, his analysis of the bills as they are currently written indicates that federal authorities would not be given the authority or the tools they would require to request a court order to take down any Web site (the bills concentrate on sites based abroad) based on content evaluation alone.

Crisis averted, so far. Last week's hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was stacked in favor of the Internet blacklist bill but we seem to have come out unscathed.

Public outcry against the bill rallied enough opposition to keep it from sailing through. Google testified against the bill, MasterCard voiced some objections, and tens of thousands of users lit up their representatives' phone lines thanks to Tumblr. But it's not over.

HR 3261 has riled up the internet and with good reason. We take a look at the effects of the new bill, in an easy to follow infographic from the folks at AmericanCensorship.org. 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.

Las Zetas kill another "blogger." A body was hung from the same overpass where two bloggers were murdered last month. According to the Houston Chronicle, a sign hung with his body said, in Spanish, "This happened to me for not understanding that I shouldn't report on the social networks."

Representatives of the Nuevo Laredo En Vivo forum denied the person was one of their moderators. One of the previous victims was a moderator there.

The Internet is rising up to oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act, which is just a noble name wrapped around a dangerous package. It's an overreaching bill being pushed in the name of Homeland Security, even going so far as to target Mozilla specifically for refusing to comply with past requests.

Today is American Censorship Day, and it happens to coincide with a hearing in the U.S. House about this censorship bill. To raise awareness of the importance of stopping SOPA, Tumblr has artfully censored everyone's blog dashboards and linked to a petition form at the top of the page under the heading, "Stop The Law That Will Censor The Internet!"