CAIRO: A campaign organized by Internet services and their millions of users has forced the US Congress to postpone legislation to stop online piracy on Friday for an indefinite period of time. The bill, if it had been passed by the legislature, would have prevented the piracy of movies and music, which costs U.S. companies billions of dollars every year. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a United States bill that was proposed by U.S. Republican Representative Lamar S. Smith to expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. On January 20, Lamar Smith postponed plans to draft the bill, “until there is wider agreement on a solution.” An additional proposed law, with the stated goal of giving the US government and copyright holders additional tools to curb access to “rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods”, is the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), a similar version to SOPA. In the wake of online protests held on January 18, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that a vote on the bill would be indefinitely postponed. According to critics of SOPA, such as the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the bill's wording is vague enough that a single complaint about a site could be enough to block it. An additional argument made by the critics is that the bill would also result in censorship and stifle Internet innovation. Up to January 20, various websites have taken a range of actions in protest of the bill. Google ran an online petition which it says collected more than 7 million signatures from the United States, and the English Wikipedia blackout occurred for 24 hours on January 18–19. A loose association of hackers known as “Anonymous” took a radical approach to expressing their objection to an indictment carried out by federal officials against Megaupload.com, one of the world's biggest file-sharing sites, by shut down the Justice Department website for several hours and hacked the site of the Motion Picture Association of America, taking a radical approach to expressing their objection. “Even without SOPA having been passed yet, the federal government always had tremendous power to do some of the things that they want to do. So if this is what can occur without SOPA being passed, imagine what can occur after SOPA is passed,” Barrett Brown, described as a spokesperson for the group Anonymous by news outlet RT, commented. In any case, the rebellion of so many people with similar concerns against the bill has been a major turnaround and has successfully resulted in the postponing of the legislation until further notice. BM ShortURL: http://goo.gl/khZHC Tags: SOPA Section: Media, Op-ed
