SOPA / PIPA Co-Sponsors Drop Like Flies As Millions Protest. Today the Internet is witnessing the largest protest in its history, aimed at killing two pending anti-piracy bills.
The effort has not been without results. During the past few hours several Senators who co-sponsored SOPA and PIPA have dropped their support. How PIPA and SOPA Violate White House Principles Supporting Free Speech and Innovation. Over the weekend, the Obama administration issued a potentially game-changing statement on the blacklist bills, saying it would oppose PIPA and SOPA as written, and drew an important line in the sand by emphasizing that it “will not support” any bill “that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.
" Blacklist Bills Becoming Hot Button Issue in 2012 Election. When Congress comes back into session at the end of January, both the House and the Senate are expected to make passing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP (PIPA) a top priority.
But representatives may want to think twice before voting yes; voters are taking notice. Members of both parties are seeing election opponents explaining how SOPA will censor free speech and stifle innovation, and the presidential candidates are being asked pointed questions about whether they support the bill that will almost certainly kill jobs. Yesterday, Rep. Paul Ryan, a member of the Republican House leadership, turned against SOPA after a backlash from the social news site Reddit. After leading a successful boycott against Go Daddy, Reddit users decided to turn its sights on politicians supporting SOPA. The pressure worked. But Ryan isn’t the only Congressman feeling the heat. Republican Rep. As you’ll notice, these challengers are emerging on both the left and right. An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress. Today, a group of 83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers sent an open letter to members of the United States Congress, stating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills that are under consideration in the House and Senate respectively.
We, the undersigned, have played various parts in building a network called the Internet. We wrote and debugged the software; we defined the standards and protocols that talk over that network. Many of us invented parts of it. SOPA undermines the U.S. in its negotiations for a free, open Internet. Yesterday, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) approved a Recommendation on Principles for Internet Policy Making [pdf].
It contains a set of 14 principles intended as a blueprint guiding Internet policy development for its 34 member states. Many of these principles uphold core values we have long championed: fostering an open Internet, evidence-based policy-making, multi-stakeholder policy development, decentralized online decision-making, effective global privacy protections, and limiting Internet intermediary liability. But all is not well on the Internet. In spite of this OECD policy framework, efforts at online censorship and spying abound. Members of the U.S. government itself are attempting to push through legislation measures that would subvert many of the core principles found in this document. Another OECD Principle aimed at promoting an open, decentralized and interconnected network is similarly undermined. An Explosion of Opposition to the Internet Blacklist Bill.
On the eve of the House Judiciary Committee's hearing on the Stop Internet Piracy Act—where five witnesses will appear in favor of the bill to just one against—a broad group of tech companies, lawmakers, experts, professors, and rights groups have come out against the bill.
The statements, written by people from a variety of backgrounds and political persuasions, incorporate many of the same broad themes: SOPA will threaten perfectly legal websites, stifle innovation, kill jobs, and substantially disrupt the infrastructure of the Internet. Here is a small sample of what they had to say: A veritable Who's Who of tech giants—including Facebook, Google, Twitter, eBay, Yahoo, AOL and Mozilla—explicitly came out against both SOPA and PROTECT-IP in a letter to the ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary committees: Unfortunately, the bills as drafted would expose law-abiding U.S. A bipartisan group of ten Congress members, including Republican Presidential candidate Rep. Wrapping Up a Week Of Action Against SOPA. Yesterday and today, the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee has hunkered down in the Capitol for markup sessions of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act.
The basic facts looked bleak: this Internet blacklist bill is a disaster that stands at odds with the Constitution, but the deep pockets of its legacy media backers managed to make it enough friends in committee that its quick passage seemed possible. Judiciary Committee Chairman, author of the bill, and “Hollywood’s Favorite Republican” Lamar Smith scheduled just a single hearing, stacked the deck in his bill’s favor, and rushed it through to markup now, at the end of the legislative session. But then a funny thing happened: the Internet fought back. It started in bits and pieces, from our coverage of the bill’s introduction to the citizens who took our action alert and told their Congressmembers that Internet censorship is unacceptable.
It’s been quite a week. And it looks like it made a difference.