Frankly, before the beginning of last week, the world didn’t know much about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). Then, within a few days, SOPA swept across social medium platforms like wildfire informing users of its’ dangerous implications and urging others to protest against it.

Websites illustrated their opposition by going “dark” (offline), and even incorporated messages on their sites for users to call their representatives and speak out against the bill. Major companies, such as Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, Facebook, and many others, galvanized public opinion and rallied criticism. If that wasn’t enough, protestors took to the streets in New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington to show that SOPA will “break or destroy the Internet as we know it.”

And what exactly were SOPA critics crying out against? The proposed bill would have impacted a whole host of issues, but let’s focus on the ones near and dear to our work as a digital agency.

Marketers are quickly learning that effective social media practices involve engagement. You can’t solely target your audience and “spread the word”; that won’t cut it anymore. Now, we must create content that audiences find worthy and are compelled to share with others. So how does this relate back to SOPA?

Well, SOPA attacks the very premise of social media: being able to share content with others. Since the government would attack copyright infringement, they would have the ability to target sites that had questionable copyrighted content. Google would be shut down if someone were to upload a pirated song to YouTube. And we all know that’s inevitable and impossible for YouTube to control.

Also, imagine Ellen DeGeneres holding a contest where fans had to post videos of a funny dance to win two tickets to her show. If any of those participants used pirated music, the entire Ellen DeGeneres website could be shut down. No matter how trivial it sounds, the government would have the ability to block domain names and threaten the livelihood of social media.

SOPA legislators quickly learned that they had awakened the beast and slowly, proponents of the bill began to withdraw their support. Then, on Friday morning, Lamar Smith, chief sponsor of SOPA, pulled the proposed bill altogether, noting that legislators will need to revisit the idea of combating online piracy.

Politics aside, SOPA’s “death” represents a huge victory for the Internet and more specifically, social media users. The overwhelming amount of opposition proved to the government that they can’t control what is not rightfully theirs. Internet users and social media enthusiasts illustrated their desire for freedom of speech and an uncensored Internet. SOPA was threatening to take those innate rights away.

However, Smith stated that SOPA has only been postponed. It is likely that legislators will try to develop a similar bill that will combat piracy and inadvertently regulate the digital world.

If so, buckle up legislators; this isn’t a fight where the Internet will lose.