The End Of The SOPA Opera?

The White House officially weighed in against the House GOP's Stop Online Piracy Act this weekend, and House Republicans are split on the bill as well, so much so that the bill isn't going anywhere anytime soon and has been shelved indefinitely.

On the White House blog Saturday morning, administration officials responded to two petitions calling for President Obama to veto the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and any similar bills.

“While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet,” they said.

“Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small. We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet.”

Indeed, the online petitions filed on the White House's website got 50,000 plus signatures to kill SOPA and for good reason:  the bill basically would move the burden of proof of copyright violation from the accuser to the accused, meaning any content creator could come along and say that a major website (or a blog like this one, for example) were violating copyright laws.  It would then be up to the accused to prove they weren't doing so, and in the meantime, the entire website could be shut down until the site could prove they weren't violating the SOPA law, and all it would take is a couple of instances that might be violations to undo an entire site for good.  As a result, ISPs would then have to block the site in question or face stiff legal penalties.

Under SOPA, the internet as we know it would be over.  Certainly the era of blogs and video sites and user-posted content would be over with, which is exactly what the media giants want.  Needless to say, the backlash from both the left and the right and Silicon Valley against this has been massive, enough so that the bill is now being pulled until further notice.

House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) said Friday that the controversial provision requiring Internet providers to block the domain names of overseas websites accused of hosting copyright content would be removed from SOPA. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-MI) promised a day before to remove the provision in the Senate’s version, the PROTECT IP Act.

Saturday morning, Rep. Darrell Issa indicated that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor promised him that SOPA “would not be taken up” in the House until a ‘consensus’ on anti-piracy legislation is found.

Needless to say, that's going to be a long time away.  Once again, the internet has survived.