There are two prongs to that process:

1) The site in question has to be located on a server outside the US and

2) The stop order is brough to the court by the US Attorney General.

Which means that it doesn't target piracy in the US, that's already a crime under the jurisdiction of the FBI. It only prevents Americans from accessing foreign sites with content that US law considers to be the property of US companies. For instance, if a legitimate comics site in the UK carried a comic strip with characters or content that are in the public domain in Europe, but not in the US, it could be blocked.

It also means that in order to invoke the right to stop foreign pirates from stealing your work, you have to get ion the radar of the US Attorney General. Which primarily means that it is a "right" more accessible to big corporations than regular people.

By the way it's done, it gives large US corporations the opportunity to dispose of foreign competition without having to legitimately prove that a crime has been committed. Just the appearance of impropriety is enough. After which the burden of proof (and the cost of litigation) is on the accused.

It also legitimizes Chinese censorship and Iranian censorship et al. It means that the US cannot object to any other country limiting Internet access to material deemed to be in violation of their laws. 

It's a foolish measure. Just like Obama suggested that there should be international co-operation to eliminate Tax-shelters in micro-nations, there should be International Law-enforcement co-operation dealing with cybercrime rather than this type of one-sided blanket censorship.

With commercial sites like Youtube, fines and penalties for copyright breach are more of an encouragement to improve their self-policing than the threat of a ban.

Also, there is a provision in copyright and trademark law that someone has to actively and vigorously defend ones rights of risk forfeiting them into public domain. Which is why companies like Disney have to send cease and desist notices to kindergartens with unlicensed Donald Duck murals, for instance. Softening those requirements for copyright holders, so that ignoring minor non-profit infringement does not jeopardize their commercial rights to the copyrights and trademarks, might be a better fix.

Wow, I clearly have lived under a rock lately.  I didn't even know what this was until today. This stuff is so far outside my wheelhouse. I've read a few articles about it and still have yet to see (or at least comprehend) how it affects users at the end of the line?  Can I still get to iTunes, eBay and here?

I found a SOPA for dummies link for others, who, like me, are in the tall grass on matters interweb.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pkjK3fllT3Oojtl3tsk5CC2c nIIKiWGodPHGdDAknjQ/edit?hl=en_US&pli=1 #

Ok, wow, that's a bit one-sided.  Maybe dumbed down a bit too much. I'm not that dumb.  So, the counter-argument is that copyright infringement is protected under 1st Amendment??

I am immediately, and nearly irrevocably, turned off by arguments that end in some variation of "1933 Germany" unless that argument is actually about 1933 Germany.

Wow, I clearly have under a rock lately.  I didn't even know what this was until today. This stuff is so far outside my wheelhouse. I've read a few articles about it and still have yet to see (or at least comprehend) how it affects users at the end of the line?  Can I still get to iTunes, eBay and here?

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Craig, the Bill targets websites outside of the US. Now that could affect your ability to access ones ability to see that Spider-man comission by artist X who lives in the UK. I inked Guido Gui, who lives in Italy, on Transformers a few years back. You might not be able to access his web site if the bill passes as written.

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The problem with legislation like this is that it is coming along far too late in the game. It is a complete mystery to me why regulations were not set in place upon the internet from the moment it was first switched on. The chances for abuse must have been obvious from the start.

Now, we are going to have to try to shoehorn in legislation which cannot, initially, be 100% effective, or 100% productive. Likely it will NEVER be 100% anything. But it's long past time for a starting point to be set in place, and if there are some bumps in the road as we work out how to get this all up to its most efficient speed, then that will be the price we pay for having left it all alone far too long.

No law has ever been perfect from the get-go. If we refused to initiate laws until they were, we'd have anarchy -- sort of what we have on the internet.

Anti-piracy legislation is a good thing.

Problem is that you have a lot of sites where kids put up music videos of themselves singing copyrighted songs (copyright infringement), Art sites where kids put up their drawings of copyrighted characters etc. These may all be targeted.

In the wider sense, this law might also be used to target sites that use copyrighted material within the established boundaries of fair use. Or sites with material that is similar to content copyrighted in the US, but that is either legally copyrighted in its country of origin or in the public domain.

The big problem is that nothing has to be proven in order for the order to go through to block, the burden of proof is on the sites being blocked. And the order can only be contested in a US court.

Youtube, for instance, is an example of a site that, if it had been located outside the US, would easily be shut down.

And the presedence it establishes is one that makes it almost impossible to protect freedom of speech on the Internet in China, Iran and other authoritarian regimes.  The technology, both hardware and software, to control the cybernetic borders of the US will, thanks to the free market, be available to everybody. As for political pressure to open up these countries, none can be applied without lumping the US in with the "Censorship Nations."

Yes, piracy must be fought. But legislation should be targeted and observe due process.