Last week, news about the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act was back in the spotlight as Wikipedia, along with hundreds of other websites, participated in a “blackout” protest, where they shut down for all of Wednesday and urged visitors to call their congressmen to voice their opinions on the issue.

This action was incredibly effective. Within a few hours of the blackout’s commencement, congressmen tweeted saying they no longer supported the bill. By the end of the day, over half of the senators who originally voiced support for the bill announced that they would vote against it.

Finally, on Friday afternoon, U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) who proposed the measures withdrew them until, as he puts it, “there is a wider agreement towards the solution.”

While the actions of this past week are certainly a landmark in the fight against piracy, it is certainly not the end, nor should it be.

The problem of online, international piracy is still a serious issue. It is estimated that certain companies lose millions of dollars to illegal software, music and movie pirates every year. We agree that there must be something done to curtail this growing problem, but the way outlined in these two bills was not the solution.

These two bills would’ve given an unbelievable amount of power to media producers. Basically, if a copyright holder had even a slight suspicion that a website was infringing one of its copyrights, the holder would have to power to get the site shut down, no questions asked. Granted, if the website went to court and was able to prove that it didn’t commit any infringement, it could go back online.

But being offline for even a few days can be disastrous to a website, financially and otherwise. And even if they won the case, they may not have the ability to go back online.

Of course, the big name copyright holders and software advocacy groups such as Sony and the Entertainment Software Association loved these bills. But the real problem was that they gave the government and any copyright holder an ultimate means of censorship.

For example, a movie studio would have had the power to shut down any website, even this one, that posted a negative review on its latest film. Had this bill passed, websites would need to be extremely careful to cater to these companies’ interests. This cuts into their freedom of speech.

A free and open Internet is absolutely necessary for the transmission of ideas and opinions, but it also enables pirates to freely transmit copyrighted works, which no doubt needs to be stopped. Our leaders on Capitol Hill need to find a way to hinder would-be pirates, but also adhere to the maxims upon which our country was founded, namely the freedom of speech and the presumption of innocence.