Yesterday, Congress held hearings on the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), two pieces of legislation introduced in the House and the Senate, respectively, that would drastically change the Internet—and not for the better.

The bills were authored in response to theft of American intellectual property over the Internet, which explains the wide variety of groups that are in favor of the bill. The United States Chamber of Commerce, the Motion Picture Association of America, the American Federation of Musicians, the Directors Guild of America, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Screen Actors Guild are just a few of the groups that support this legislation.

Those groups are interested in protecting the content that they create, and they have a right to own. The sheer amount of knowledge that is stolen over the Internet, without any compensation to its creators, is entirely unfair. That problem needs to be curbed, but Protect IP and SOPA are the wrong answers.

Both bills would give the U.S. attorney general the ability to blacklist certain websites from Internet providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks. Users would be prohibited from accessing these sites or wouldn’t be able to find them on search engines like Google. All of this could be done without any sort of legal review, hearing or decision by a member of the judiciary.

SOPA also gives private companies the ability to sue websites that host content that infringes on copyright, even if the post was done without knowledge of the content’s copyright status and was only up for a short period of time. Currently, hosting companies are protected from litigation so long as the content that infringes on copyrights is taken down as soon as the host is made aware of the breach.

For sites like YouTube and Facebook, this means that if someone posts content that infringes on copyright, the sites are responsible for that content in a court of law. No company wants to undergo litigation, but for websites with content created by their users, that is exactly what will happen…unless they start censoring content before it is posted.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, and LinkedIn released a letter to Congress today, saying that if the bills passed, they would have to constantly monitor their content for copyright infringement, before it goes up, or face litigation. Some of these groups even “censored” their logos as a protest against the bills.

Imagine the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street without Facebook or Twitter. Those protests would not have existed without the ability for protestors to organize through social media. Any censorship of content would limit the ability of protestors to meet and to communicate.

These laws pose a serious danger to the “freedom of the Internet” that we have all become accustomed to. It will control what websites people can reach, what content they can see, what content they can post, and it will increase the levels of censorship by companies whose websites are hosting that content.

The Internet is about the exchange of ideas, a place where all of the information of the human race is collected and can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection. These bills will destroy that landscape forever.

If Protect IP and SOPA become law, students will no longer be able to post what they want to YouTube or Facebook, or visit sites that were blacklisted for illegitimate reasons. Such sites will be either blacklisted or self-censored. The information that we normally get from the Internet, and the ability to retrieve it, will be unavailable.

We understand that creators of intellectual property have a right to that property and a right to ensure they are correctly compensated for the usage of anything they create. Those creators are correct in trying to protect it, but Protect IP and SOPA are not the ways to do so.

Copyright infringement on the Internet is a problem that needs to be addressed, but we can’t address that problem by destroying everything the Internet is about in the process.