This February, Bud Light – the official beer sponsor of the NFL – is taking up residence in downtown Indianapolis for Super Bowl XLVI with the return of the Bud Light Hotel.

Beginning Thursday, Feb. 2, Bud Light will transform a 180-room downtown Indianapolis hotel (105 S. Meridian Street) into the premier destination for Super Bowl week entertainment. In addition to hosting exclusive parties from EA SPORTS and Playboy, the Bud Light Hotel will host a special concert featuring 50 Cent, Lil Jon and Bud Light-sponsored artist Pitbull the night before the Super Bowl and a special afternoon concert featuring the Barenaked Ladies before the game. The full Bud Light Hotel line-up of events includes:

• Thursday, Feb. 2 – EA SPORTS Madden Bowl XVIII (invitation only)
• Friday, Feb. 3 – The Playboy Party (invitation only)
• Saturday, Feb. 4 – 50 Cent, Lil Jon and Pitbull (doors open at 8 p.m.)
• Sunday, Feb. 5 – Barenaked Ladies (doors open at 2 p.m.)

Tickets for the Saturday and Sunday concerts are available throughout the Indianapolis metropolitan area, and more information can be found at www.BudLightHotel.com. Bud Light has also partnered with Yahoo! as the exclusive live broadcast partner of the Saturday night concert, ensuring fans across the country will be able to enjoy the Bud Light Hotel experience the night before Super Bowl XLVI.

The concert will be broadcast live on omg! from Yahoo!, the No.1 celebrity news site reaching more than 31 million fans per month at http://omg.yahoo.com/super-bowl-party-central and available on Yahoo! Screen (http://Screen.Yahoo.com), Yahoo!’s newly launched video destination.

“Bud Light Hotel has steadily become the epicenter of the entertainment during Super Bowl week, and we don’t know of any place in Indy where people can find a better, more diverse line-up of good times,” said Mike Sundet, senior director, Bud Light. ”And through our partnership with Yahoo!, we’ll liven up the Saturday night of music fans everywhere with the concert event of Super Bowl week.”

“The Bud Light Hotel concert has already become a signature Super Bowl week event that fans look forward to and now can experience this incredible line-up on Yahoo!,” said Ken Fuchs, VP, Yahoo! Media Network. “We are thrilled to be bringing this fantastic event exclusively to our 80 million music and sports fans around the country.”

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A new bill set to pass through the United States Senate has many internet users worried about the future of online censorship. SOPA, an acronym for the Stop Online Piracy Act, was proposed as one the latest attempts to protect copyright and control online media pirates.

However, the bill’s vague parameters are already raising concerns and objections that the loose wording may be ripe for corporate manipulation. The aim of the legislation is to crack down on pirating by targeting rogue sites outside of U.S. borders. SOPA would allow the government to disband any website that hosts copyrighted material, and an individual who streams such material could also be tried for committing a federal offense.

Search engines, blogs, and directories with links to infringing content would be required to remove the offensive link under threat of lawsuit. It would force host websites to take responsibility for all of the material uploaded rather than merely serving as an impartial medium, hence the fear that major video sharing websites like Youtube could become targets.

Web giant Google went so far as to call the bill ‘draconian’, and Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Redditt, among others, are taking a similar stance. Vice-President Biden also has announced his anti-SOPA position, claiming that the bill would create a fragmented and divided internet.

Others point to the fact that no new statues are actually being introduced by the bill, and that the government already has the means to combat internet theft through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Although SOPA has garnered a lot of support from the entertainment industry, many technology experts fear that it would irrevocably change the internet for the worse, stifling innovation and many promising young online businesses.

Art Bordsky, a Washington-based public policy expert, recently explained some of the potential implications of the bill to The Guardian:

“The international aspects alone are very worrying,” he said. “It appears that the US is taking control of the entire world. The definitions written in the bill are so broad that any US consumer who uses a website overseas immediately gives the US jurisdiction the power to potentially take action against it.”

Despite rising opposition, SOPA’s supporters are insistent that the legislation is in fact needed to combat the issue of piracy, and that complaints of government censorship are overblown. Careful analysis of the bill reveals that sites host infringing information must demonstrate “willful intent” to be prosecuted, which would offer protection to sites like Youtube.

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the issue on November 16th, and SOPA is expected to go to markup sometime around December 15th.

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