Well, well, well, well. Just like I, and many others with me, have said: SOPA is most certainly not dead. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith has just pushed out a press release stating that the House debate on SOPA will continue in February, ‘unshelving’ SOPA only a few days after it was supposedly shelved.
Smith’s words would be hilarious if they weren’t coming from one of the most powerful government bodies in the world (link added for dramatic effect). “To enact legislation that protects consumers, businesses and jobs from foreign thieves who steal America’s intellectual property, we will continue to bring together industry representatives and Members to find ways to combat online piracy,” he states.
“Due to the Republican and Democratic retreats taking place over the next two weeks, markup of the Stop Online Piracy Act is expected to resume in February,” he added, “I am committed to continuing to work with my colleagues in the House and Senate to send a bipartisan bill to the White House that saves American jobs and protects intellectual property.”
Well, it’s not exactly the “Protecting American Jobs and Loving Puppies and God Act” as I jokingly predicted, but give the guy a few more press releases and he’ll get there. I guess this also vindicates my position that Obama’s statement was entirely meaningless – some argued that the shelving of SOPA was at least in part due to this statement.
In any case, the protests tomorrow would’ve continued anyway, but now they’ve just gotten even more meaningful.
Remain Vigilant. The content industry will not go down this easily. We need to direct all our anger and hatred at SOPA and PIPA and keep an eye on Rep. Lamar Smith. We can win this, but we must keep fighting.
Just to throw fuel on the fire: http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00001811
Scroll to “Top 5 Industries, 2011-2012”
Yes, and the act won’t be renamed into something about saving puppies. No because the opposition is the internet, open source communities and human rights activists, it will be named as something WE find instinctively appealing.
Prepare to have your rights violated by the O.P.E.N. act!
Unfortunately, they’ll (the idiot members of congress and their paymasters) keep doing this until something gets passed.
So the blackout doesn’t apply to the mobile site, apparently… or the RSS feed.
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:11.0a2) Gecko/20120115 Firefox/11.0a2
When software begins to be inherentely tied to fundamental freedoms:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.75 Safari/535.7
FTA: “I guess this also vindicates my position that Obama’s statement was entirely meaningless”
Sorry Thom, I’ll grant you most of what you have said about SOPA and PIPA, but I’m not entirely sure about the bit quoted above.
Here’s why:
http://www.deadline.com/2012/01/exclusive-hollywood-moguls-stopping…
Follow the money.
I am not surprised that SOPA has been shelved for now. The critters in congress and the senate know better than to impose such rubbish in an election year. The lawmakers will wait until the elections are safely behind them to pass this. It is conceivable that the legislation that is passed after the election will be even worse. American politicians have a long history of doing such things. The politicians know that, thanks to the short memory of the typical voter, there will be no consequences to passing such crap legislation if they time it correctly.
God I hate election years here in the U.S. …
He is the president… he has no control what a chairperson of the committee (who is of the opposite political party) that is currently debating the bill brings to the floor of the committee room for debate…. Nor does he have control over what the speaker and majority leader allow to be brought to the floor for a final vote….what he can do is VETO the bill if this pile of crap passes both he house and senate.
We do not live in a monarchy or a parliamentary system. The president is the head of state not the head of our legislative body.