U.S. Representative Lamar Smith would like to remind you that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) he helped architect is not dead yet. The House will continue marking up the proposed legislation in February, according to a press release. By the beginning of this week, the bill was considered by many to be as good as dead, given recent political developments, including a statement from the Obama Administration that condemned the more restrictive and controversial aspects of SOPA and related legislation.
The news comes a matter of hours before the start of what is expected to be a widespread, Web-based protest against the anti-piracy legislation. Yesterday, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made headlines by announcing that the enormous, user-generated encyclopedia will go dark tomorrow in protest of SOPA, joining Reddit, Mozilla, BoingBoing, all of the Cheezburger sites and others.
Today, the list of companies and organizations participating in the anti-SOPA protests grew to include such key players in the technology community as O’Reilly Media and Google. Rather than blacking out its services entirely, the search giant will simply add a link to its homepage highlighting its opposition to SOPA. It’s not quite as dramatic as what Wikipedia and Reddit are doing, but given Google’s daily reach, the move is likely to have a significant impact nonetheless.
All of this is the culmination of weeks of anti-SOPA sentiment and demonstrations that have been brewing across the Internet. What started as a Reddit-fueled PR campaign against GoDaddy and other SOPA supporters has turned into a much larger scale digital demonstration.
The bill was weakened somewhat over the weekend when Smith announced that the controversial DNS blocking provision would be shelved pending further research. SOPA would still force search engines to censor results and give the government the power to cut off funds to allegedly infringing websites.
It’s true that SOPA as it was originally drafted will not likely see the light of the day, but today’s announcement reminded those on both sides of the debate that it’s far from over.
