Update: Congress Reacts To SOPA Protest

TODAY IS WEDNESDAY, MAY 16, 2012

Posted by Alex Kingsbury on Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Congressional support for the Stop Online Piracy Act is flagging, as web giants Google and Wikipedia and numerous other websites, joined an internet-based protest of the proposed legislation today. We talked about the SOPA and the protests here.

Republican Senators Marcio Rubio of Florida and John Cornyn of Texas, both said today they now opposed the Senate version of the bill as currently written. (It’s called the Protect IP Act, or PIPA). Rubio had been a co-sponsor the Senate bill.

Meanwhile, South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, tweeted this morning that while he supported the need for a bill, the current legislation was “misguided.” Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez from New Jersey, also raised concerns about the bill in a tweet.

The White House announced that it opposed the bill last weekend.

Republican Congressman Ben Quayle from Arizona and Nebraska Rep. Lee Terry, both co-sponsors of the House version, announced yesterday that they were withdrawing their support for the legislation, known in the House as the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA.

The Senate bill has 39 remaining co-sponsors and the House version has 29.

James

I think this is more than a conversation about direct regulation, it seems what is at the root is the definition of piracy. Your guest spoke of downloading ebooks in one swoop, how it this different than going to the library? and getting books there for personal consumption, shouldn’t the issue be selling copied material. We as Americans are moving from a Read Only “RO” to a Read and Write culture “RW” culture, by the nature of the technology. In this I see a future of a new consumer economy.�
James – New Bedford, MA

Lynn Allen

We have lots and lots of laws concerning copyright and theft etc. to protect the copyrighted material.
Use the current laws. Enforce the current laws. You can not legislate enforcement – you can only muddy the laws with spiderweb of contradictions to the current law.�
They have been prosecuting thefts, they just need to do more of it. They need to develop a technology that is not censorship to accomplish it.

http://profiles.google.com/caleb.b.king X X

Any attempt to paint this as simply a war between 2 industry sectors – Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley – is intentionally deceptive. The anti-SOPA/PIPA effort has been championed by scores of citizens rights, civil liberties, freedom of expression and anti-censorship activist groups and millions of concerned citizens who called their representatives and signed hosts of petitions. There has been a huge upswell of public outrage against the draconian, Corporatist measures and not a shred of public support for the bills. This is not two industries warring each other: rather it is the public and the public interest sector warring against the lords of corporate media and their friends in the intelligence & military communities who want to use their heavy-handed legislation to greatly expand surveillance and censorship powers, and to limit the exposure of people all over the world to alternative news media. Such media questions, for instance, the United States’ baseless war-mongering and subversion of developing nations’ national sovereignty in favor of powerful commercial interests.

Any attempt to discuss SOPA/PIPA in absence of larger efforts to prepare the way for the ratification of ACTA is also a disservice to the public’s right to be informed about policies that affect their daily lives.

Caleb King
Jamaica Plain, MA
http://profile.yahoo.com/7ZUHFQHDDHHGD55S4X7GS5RH2A Yan

I think this is more than a conversation about direct regulation, it
seems what is at the root is the definition of piracy. Your guest spoke
of downloading ebooks in one swoop, how it this different than going to
the library? and getting books there for personal
consumption, shouldn’t the issue be selling copied material. We as
Americans are moving from a Read Only “RO” to a Read and Write culture
“RW” culture, by the nature of the technology .
Feiba

Any attempt to discuss SOPA/PIPA in absence of larger efforts to prepare
the way for the ratification of ACTA is also a disservice to the
public’s right to be informed about policies that affect their daily
lives .