Techdirt has been writing quite a bit about SOPA and PIPA. Mike Masnick writes that The Pirate Bay, a well known foreign, copyright-violating website, will not be affected by SOPA, which intended to address foreign copyright violations.
As written, nothing in SOPA can touch ThePirateBay's main website, ThePirateBay.org
That's because the current version of the bill excludes any .com or .org. from being a target (though, they can be required to take action against other sites). This has caused some confusion, mainly because of the changes between the original version of SOPA and the "manager's amendment," which is the current version of the bill. The manager's amendment makes you jump through some hoops to understand this, but the key point is that a "U.S.-directed site" is defined to be a "foreign internet site" in the bill (in the original SOPA, a U.S.-directed site could be any site). Then, a foreign domain name is listed as not a "domestic domain" (keep hopping!), which itself is defined as "a domain name that is registered or assigned by a domain name registrar, domain name registry or other domain name registration authority that is located within a judicial district of the United States."
This means that all .com or .org domains are domestic, since they're assigned by a registry that is located within the US (for those confused, a domain registry is a company like VeriSign that runs the master database of all domains under a single top level domain). The thinking here is that (as ICE and the Justice Department have claimed) any website that has a TLD that is controlled by an American company can be dealt with via existing laws, such as the one that ICE uses to seize websites. .com is run by VeriSign, which is based in the US. And .org is run by the Public Interest Registry, which is also based in the US (Virginia, specifically).
Basically, Masnick writes that SOPA as it stands is so poorly designed, that it will not have an impact on websites like The Pirate Bay, RapidShare, and Megaupload. I only have a basic understanding about the technicalities of SOPA, but if Masnick is correct about this then it would be tremendously embarrassing for the SOPA supporters in Congress.