As prominent websites such as Wikipedia, Reddit, Boing Boing, and thousands of others prepare to participate in a global web blackout to protest the terms of pending intellectual property legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act ("SOPA"), there are growing reports that the legislation already may have been shelved.
As detailed in my November post, SOPA and two other similar bills making their way through Congress - - the PROTECT IP Act and the Online Protection and Digital ENforcement Act ("OPEN") - - have drawn Hollywood and the tech community to opposite sides of the IP battlefield. Proponents of the proposed new law argue it is necessary to protect against piracy and copyright infringement by offshore "rogue sites." However, many have opposed the bill because proposed to penalize innovators, not only infringers, and will punish inventors in a manner that violates the First Amendment.
Many law professors, tech companies, free speech advocates and political figures have taken issue with the legislation which, among other things, permits the U.S. attorney general to obtain court order against targeted website that would result in Internet service providers having to take the accused sites offline. For example, section 102 of SOPA provides that, once a service provider is served with such an order, the service provider must take "technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof)" within five days after being served with a copy of the order. Critics point to that provision as constituting a draconian measure that will chill speech and allow websites to be shuttered before charges are ever proven in court, and even if they are only tangentially involved in the accused conduct.
On Monday, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, announced on Twitter that Wikipedia would join the blackout protest, in which participating websites plan to go dark for 24 hours on Wednesday, January 18, 2012. Google has announced it will participate in the protest, but without shutting off its services. And President Obama joined the fray over the weekend, opposing the current version of SOPA, OPEN and the PROTECT IP Act. While recognizing that online piracy harms the U.S. economy, threatens jobs and hurts certain innovative companies and entrepreneurs," the White House announced, "[a]ny 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."
Darrell Issa, chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, announced that he had received assurances from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor that the anti-piracy legislation would not move to the House floor without a consensus. He also postponed his committee's hearing on the impact of Domain Name Service ("DNS") and search engine blocking on the Internet, which had been scheduled for Wednesday, the day of the blackout protest.
Watch this space for further developments, although not necessarily on Wednesday.
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