January 20, 2012 2:12 PM

SOPA is dead, Smith pulls bill

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CBS News Staff
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(Credit: CNET)
(AP) - Yielding to strong opposition from the high tech community, Senate and House leaders said Friday they will put off further action on legislation to combat online piracy.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he was postponing a test vote set for Tuesday "in light of recent events." Those events included a petition drive by Google that attracted more than 7 million participants and a one-day blackout by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Full coverage of SOPA, PIPA at Tech Talk
SOPA and PIPA Internet blackout aftermath, staggering numbers

House Judiciary Committee chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, quickly followed suit, saying consideration of a similar House bill would be postponed "until there is wider agreement on a solution."

The Senate's Protect Intellectual Property Act and the House's Stop Online Piracy Act have strong support from the entertainment industry and other businesses that lose billions of dollars

annually to intellectual property theft and online sales of counterfeit products. But they also have strong opposition from Internet-related companies that argue the bill would lead to over-regulation and censorship of the Internet.

Reid has also seen at least a half-dozen senators who sponsored the bill announce they now oppose it.

Reid said counterfeiting and piracy cost the American economy billions of dollars every year and "there is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved." He said he was optimistic about reaching a compromise in the coming weeks.

The main Senate sponsor, Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said he respected Reid's decision to postpone the vote but lamented the Senate's unwillingness to debate the bill.

"The day will come when the senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem," he said. Criminals in China, Russia and other countries "who do nothing but peddle in counterfeit products and stolen American content are smugly watching how the United States Senate decided" it was not worth debating the bill.

The two bills would allow the Justice Department, and copyright holders, to seek court orders against foreign websites accused of copyright infringement. They would bar online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as credit card companies from doing business with an alleged violator. They also would forbid search engines from linking to such sites.

The Tuesday vote was on whether to move the legislation to the Senate floor for debate. With the recent desertions and a statement Thursday by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell that it is too early to consider the bill, it appeared supporters lacked the 60votes needed to advance the measure.

McConnell on Friday applauded Reid's decision, saying it would "prevent a counterproductive rush toward flawed legislation."

In the House, Smith said he had "heard from the critics" and resolved that it was "clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products." Smith had planned on holding further committee votes on his bill next month.

The bill's opponents were relieved it was put on hold.

Markham Erickson, executive director of NetCoalition, commended Congress for "recognizing the serious collateral damage this bill could inflict on the Internet."

The group represents Internet and technology companies including Google, Yahoo! and Amazon.com. Erickson said they would work with Congress "to address the problem of piracy without compromising innovation and free expression."

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who has joined Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., in proposing an alternative anti-piracy bill, credited opponents with forcing lawmakers "to back away from an effort to ram through controversial legislation."

But the CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, former Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, warned that, "as a consequence of failing to act, there will continue to be a safe haven for foreign thieves." The MPAA, which represents such companies as Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., is a leading advocate for the anti-piracy legislation.

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Add a Comment See all 23 Comments
by notfucharley January 31, 2012 2:12 PM EST
Go to abucktocrushsopa.com and give Lamar Smith's opponent a few bucks. He's a conservative, and probably not a perfect candidate for you, but he's the only one with a hope of unseating Smith, and he's strongly anti-SOPA and anti-NDAA. That's worth a buck, right?
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by fastdraw2 January 29, 2012 1:28 AM EST
gotta feel for Lamar Smith and the other Republicans with their hands out to the entertainment industry. All that money ready to go into their pockets and now they can't get their hands on it. Bummer.

Or are you naive enough to believe they really gave a rat's ass about creative piracy?
Reply to this comment
by venusvegasvada January 28, 2012 2:36 PM EST
The CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America is former Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd.

From Wikipedia:

Christopher John "Chris" Dodd (born May 27, 1944) is an American lawyer, lobbyist, and Democratic Party politician who served as a United States Senator from Connecticut for a thirty-year period ending with the 111th United States Congress.

Are you freaking kidding me? So THAT's what's going on here. I should have known.

Grow some NADS Chris and deal with your freaking problems without dragging the entire US govt into it or destroying the freedom of the internet. Hard to teach an old dog new tricks huh? You #@$cking lobbyists are ruining this country.

You guys are so used to taking kick backs and stuffing laws we don't need through the system you don't know when to stop do you?

Leave the internet free. This problem needs to be decided in the courts or through diplomats or trade sanctions. Those are your options.

The real problem you Senators and Representatives have with countries like China is you really have very limited things you can do against them, thanks to your own actions.

Because of the Senate and the House's inability of doing their most basic jobs, debt control and passing a balanced budget, we have to constantly go to countries like China with our hat in hand asking for money. You can't afford to p@ss them off or they might sell off trillions in investments and screw up the dollars value.

That's the problem. That's why your trying this internet DNS B@llsh@t. This problem is your own damn fault.

Message to the Senate and the House. Get your sh@t together and balance our budget and pay down our national debt.

Try and do something in Washington that doesn't have some lobbyist's strings attached to it.
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by cbsblogger January 28, 2012 11:25 AM EST
Why isn't Congress as concerned about protecting the intellectual property of all Americans from being pirated....which is their identity? Or are they waiting until Facebook owns the time line of our lives, our friends and the copyright so they can profit by selling and marketing it? Corporations are going to become the bane of our existence and the owners of our government and ourselves.
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by venusvegasvada January 28, 2012 2:41 PM EST
Good points.
by rwsmith29456 January 23, 2012 10:03 PM EST
The bill isn't BAD. It's just WRONG. Put more thought into it and fix it.
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by Lerianis4 January 28, 2012 5:48 AM EST
No, it's bad as well and trying to fix a 'problem' that really isn't a problem and has existed for years. If companies want to stop 'piracy' (which there isn't really much of that outside of current generation console and PC games), they have to lower their prices and realize that most people have already paid for the things that they 'pirate' in some manner.

I.E. me and the movies/music/TV shows I download that I have already paid for via a Comcast cable TV subscription.
by venusvegasvada January 28, 2012 2:41 PM EST
It is bad. The internet needs to remain free.

The legal mechanisms already exist to take care of this problem. Look what's really going on here. Chris Dodd, the lobbyist head of the MPoA is behind this BS.
by cbsisgay January 23, 2012 7:48 PM EST
OK OK, but watch out theyre still at it, the child porn bill is still out there.. they wanna lookit allll your stuff! in the guise that someone out there is doing the child porn thing, and the reality is,, they are doing it, to get this legislation up, just like the entertainment companies distributed the file sharing software to create the aura of piracy so big these bills get approved easyer! to control YOU!
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by Utlayolisdi January 23, 2012 12:13 PM EST
The thing is that there are already laws that govern intellectual property theft. The new bills didn't do anything to address what is wrong with the current laws - how to pay for enforcing them.

Seems new laws are always the answer for the politicians when enforcement of existing laws is usually all that is needed. Needless to say there was more than just piracy and the like behind this legislation.

FWIW, I record and produce music and videos that have appeared on the net and have been sold via the net. It is true that our laws don't seem enforceable in places like China but the state department knows what it would do to reduce such infringements. They just seem reluctant to do so. This proposed new legislation would be just as ineffective if the feds aren't willing to enforce them.

So, even though I am one of those who may lose out a bit due to net piracy I am glad this legislation has been dropped.
Reply to this comment
by gruven13777 January 22, 2012 8:11 PM EST
A person doesn't have to be computer scientist to really understand what this is all about. In the simplest terms, basically trying to control and remove illegal copies of movies and music from the entire internet, is like trying to remove a little bit of pee from an Olympic-size swimming pool. With the advent of software like BitTorrent, that task is virtually impossible because BT breaks up the transferred files into little tiny data packets that are spread out over millions and millions of computers all over the world. So the only way to effectively get rid of all the illegal copies (the "pee")...is to drain the entire swimming pool and start over.

In short, The (global) Powers That Be, basically want all of us to be on their own internet. They want complete and total control over the whole thing so they can decide where you can or can't go...and what you can or can't say. They will be the ones to decide who gets access to what on the internet.
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by venusvegasvada January 28, 2012 2:50 PM EST
Good analogy. China and these other countries are more than capable of policing their own backyards, but they don't.

That's the real question. Why can't the Govt. go to China and force them to crack down (and it's not just these industries)? They already have the most restrictive internet in the world.

The answer to that is pretty obvious. Congress can't afford to. Because of their incompetence in dealing with our money issues they can't force China to do much of anything. We need their investments to float our debt. We are a hollow threat.

That and there are so many US Corporations now that have moved their operations to China for profit, Congress can't upset the lobbyists (like Chris Dodd) that write their payoff checks.

Always the low road.
by cybervigilante January 21, 2012 6:36 PM EST
The recording industry doesn't lose billions, they cheat artists out of billions, who are lucky to get two cents, if anything, from the twenty bucks they charge for a plastic disk. They just want their highway robbery legalized.
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by cStuartHardwick January 21, 2012 6:33 PM EST
I posted about the SOPA & PIPA powergrab, why it is not going to go away, and what we should all do about it here:
Blog: http://cstuarthardwick.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/sopa-and-pipa-are-agaianst-everyones-interests/
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0LQEJHIfw
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