SOPA and PIPA Stopped -- Next, the OPEN ACT

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It’s “Internet 1, Congress 0“: In the wake of widespread online protest, the House and the Senate have stopped both the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in their tracks. Just this Friday morning, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced that he has canceled next week’s Senate vote on PIPA, which is now indeed opposed by many of its co-sponsors. Shortly afterwards, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said that SOPA will not be taken up as planned and that legislators must “wait until there is wider agreement on a solution.”

Reid indeed acknowledged that ”recent events” — the blackout on Wikipedia and other sites including Reddit and the other protests involving an estimated 115,000 websites this past Wednesday — had played a role in his decision to postpone the vote.

PIPA sponsor Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, agreed to the change of course only “reluctantly,” painting a dire picture of how Chinese and Russian internet thieves “are smugly watching how the United States Senate decided it was not even worth debating how to stop the overseas criminals from draining our economy.” Senators have caved into pressure, Leahy charged, and will one day rue their making a “knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem.”

The Tech Community and Hollywood

There is no question online piracy is a problem. Tech companies including Google and Facebook had strongly objected to SOPA and PIPA, which granted the US Department of Justice the power to go after foreign websites offering illegal copies of movies, music and other content for free. Under these proposed laws, search engines would have had to eliminate links to such sites, while ad networks and companies that process payments would have been forbidden from doing business with them. Tech companies have been arguing that, as currently written, both bills could curtail free speech and innovation on the internet by placing an “unreasonable burden on websites to police user-generated content,” with the result that perfectly legitimate websites could — as Wikipedia did on Wednesday — go dark. Last Saturday, the Obama administration expressed its concerns about how SOPA and PIPA could “[disrupt] the underlying architecture of the Internet.”

Hollywood, the music recording industry, book publishers and the United States Chamber of Commerce have all backed SOPA and PIPA, as a means to stop the “rampant piracy of American cultural wares” by websites overseas.

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Photo by Ben Werdmuller von Elgg

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of
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Eternal G.

6:35PM PST on Feb 9, 2012

They'll all be stopped!

send a green star

Kathy P.

5:34PM PST on Jan 30, 2012

its a very controversial topic, but an invasion of rights

Annmari L.

9:45AM PST on Jan 30, 2012

Already the MPAA via the FBI have people in countries all over the world prosecuted for downloading protected music and movies and books. Just a couple of weeks ago a 16 year old in Sweden was sentenced in court for downloading a few music and movie files. All due to intervention from the MPAA and their lackeys the feds. Sweden has a law called IPRED and the whole thing was passed through legislation pushed by the US Government and their backers in the movie and media industry. SOPA and PIPA would just be a copy of IPRED, but with more countries covered and more power for the private companies to push for harsher punishments and the closing of more websites. If SOPA, PIPA and, the lates Hollywood scam, the OPEN act gets passed, it'll be Goodbye Internet and Hello dictatorship!

Ferdinand G.

5:01AM PST on Jan 25, 2012

I will tell one more time, many has already hear this, but i will said it anyway...

"Counterfeiting and piracy cost the American economy billions of dollars" It just a crap figure

There a 2 product 'A', one 100$ genuie 'A1', the second a cheap imitation from some country 10$ 'A2'.. if ten 'A2' sold is there a loss of 1000$ economy????? who the idiot count like that (it maybe potential money but not meaning actual money)

Some people just doesn't have 100$ to spend, or either 100$ 'A1' not available to them...

Good luck for americans, u will need it looks how thing going so far....

Michael M.

12:13PM PST on Jan 23, 2012

The problem was it was too wide reaching of legislation.
It would have created a whole bunch of problems if it were passed as is.

Besides that though,
you can't go to a store and find the game you want or the movie you want unless the only thing you're looking for is what's currently mainstream.

If the selection to choose from is this bad
and they wonder why everyone is downloading their media
maybe they should consider giving more selection in the stores
so people don't resort to downloading a game for example when they can't find the one they want.

I hear this again and again everyday from people who are angry about this
and I have to agree.

I love adventure games.
Good luck finding one though, because if you go to a store and look
you'll find maybe 2 games from that category ( all of which are total crap I wouldn't even want to buy)

I'm sick and tired of buying games online so I would like to see some more selection myself.
Maybe the entertainment industry wouldn't have so many problems
if there were at all considerate towards people who don't only like the status quo.

I actually came up with a model for a new kind of business that would easily solve all of these problems without having to pass anything like SOPA at all.
It's too damn bad that these companies don't listen to the little guys like us,
because it's their loss when I stop buying their media altogether over how offended I am by their attempts to violate our privacy rights.

Robert H.

12:01PM PST on Jan 23, 2012

Brain F there are already laws in the books to stop it. They just can't make their laws enforceable in other lands. I have no problem with stopping it. But this law was not the right tool.

Most of the artists are not the ones being short changed anyway. Its the Corps that are hurting. The corps are angry that the new technology has changed their business and they no longer have a monopoly in the market.

This law let them have far too much latitude and it needed to be defeated.

Brian S.

2:03AM PST on Jan 23, 2012

Remember that the moves to suspend votes on these bills were already in place before last week's on-line protests.

Also remember that while the wording of the bills may well be deemed unreasonable, their intention is not. Illegal file sharing and the theft of copyright intellectual property is wrong. It may be difficult to get the horse back into the stable after it has bolted, but we do at least need to try.

Most people who share files illegally would accept that they could not walk into their local store and walk out with a pocketful of stolen CDs, DVDs, books or newspapers. What's the diffference just because they are electronic versions?

Dan B.

3:14PM PST on Jan 22, 2012

Another victory for the 99%! ONward!

Lynnette B.

1:35PM PST on Jan 22, 2012

This is all about greed. Leave the internet alone. For all you republicans that support this, I thought you people were all about less government. Oh, I forgot, that only applies when it doesn't affect your profits.