What is SOPA and why should players be afraid of it?

Recently I hear more and more magazines write about how the Gamers should be afraid about SOPA. (Stop Online Piracy Act) This act should be against piracy but what it has to do with players?

I also heard that in various online games ingame chats will be turned off,Forums will be closed and tournaments will be banned.

What is the explanation of all this ? what does those things like ingame chat have to do with piracy?What is SOPA and why should players be afraid of it?
SOPA has been called "the end of the internet as we know it" and in my opinion if it passes and becomes law the internet will be strictly policed. Basically anything that is published online without the permission of the original copyright holder will be taken down. I have no idea what in-game chat has to do with it, quite frankly that doesn't make any sense to me. There's also a part of SOPA that says if a website has even ONE illegal file on their entire website then the site is to be taken down.



Some people might not think this is a big deal, but it is. Almost every online video streaming site will be shut down(including youtube). People won't be able to watch shows they missed on TV. People will not be able to torrent anymore. Facebook will most likely be shut down.



What the idiotic governments have not figured out is the amount of revenue these websites generate. The economy is already in the crapper and now they are talking about getting rid of hundreds of thousands-possibly millions of servers. Now, a game server generates a lot of money. Let's say that one game server generates 200 dollars a month. Now multiply that by a million. That's 200 million lost revenue. Think of the amount of money lost.What is SOPA and why should players be afraid of it?
Under SOPA:



1) Gamers who make videos of their gameplay and upload it to YouTube would be committing a felony.



2) Game blogs would have to be exceedingly careful what they post and even link to (that includes images, trailers, leaked story details), or they could be shut down for infringement.



3) Any game-based site that allows users to upload or link to files would almost certainly have to either remove or heavily moderate that feature... even a link to copyrighted content on another site can get you shut down.



4) You can almost certainly kiss game mods and modding communities goodbye.



5) Game-based sites would have to be careful not to use copyrighted images in their designs.



The major reason that people are warning that various features would be shut down is because a lot of game site owners, and even developers, don't want to have to worry about liability. If someone starts talking about where users can pirate the latest GTA game while chatting on WOW, the WOW servers could potentially be shut down under SOPA law. The developer wouldn't want to risk such a situation... so the easiest safety measure is to just remove player's ability to chat in-game.