Anti-piracy bills as a key election issue? Stay tuned…
posted Tue, 17 Jan 2012Opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)--which both threaten the right to import safe and affordable medicine--continues to mount. It’s looking like anti-piracy legislation could be a hot-button issue in this election year, but the situation continues to change and evolve.
The film, TV and music industries have already committed more than $18 million to the 2012 election cycle. And Hollywood wants the Republican Presidential candidates to commit to a stance on the bills.
Meanwhile, the user driven social news site Reddit helped raise $15,000 in 48 hours for Rob Zerban, a Democratic candidate who is running against Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) and who came out to strongly support SOPA when Ryan was slow to take a stand one way or another.
Where does the legislation stand?
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) previously put a hold on PIPA and threatened a filibuster but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) scheduled a vote for January 24 on a motion to both bypass Wyden’s hold on PIPA and to put a time limit on his threatened filibuster. If this occurs, the bill will go up for full Senate vote.
We recently reported on the House Judiciary Committee’s SOPA mark up. We just learned that the mark up will continue in early February. We hope that the bill doesn’t make it out of Committee, but if it does, we hope that Congressman Steve Cohen’s amendment passes. Rep. Cohen’s office enlisted our help with writing a SOPA amendment to ensure that none of the bill’s language can be construed to restrict access to the legitimate international online pharmacies that provide safe and affordable medicines to hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Senator Wyden and Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) have been outspoken critics of the anti-piracy legislation, even going so far as to propose their own, alternate legislation—the OPEN Act.
Rep. Issa just cancelled a hearing he had scheduled for the House Oversight Committee (of which he is chair) on Wednesday. The hearing was to address “the potential impact of Domain Name Service (DNS) and search engine blocking on American cyber-security, jobs and the Internet community.” An announcement late last week by House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith’s office provided assurance that the DNS blocking provision would be dropped from the House legislation. A number of tech experts were expected to testify at Issa’s hearing, clearly a strategy to address one of the major criticisms of those in opposition to SOPA and PIPA—that previous hearings have excluded the very people that know the most about the impact these bills would have on the architecture of the Internet. Though the House Oversight Committee doesn’t have the power to stop SOPA (it’s in the hands of House Judiciary Committee members), Rep. Issa’s actions seem to have had an influence on opinions in Washington and beyond.
There is a clear division on the anti-piracy issue and it isn’t along party lines. Check out this fascinating research put together by Dan Nguyen of ProPublica. You can find out where your representatives in Washington stand on this issue. And, more importantly, find out why.
Stay tuned to our website for periodic updates on SOPA and PIPA. We'll be participating in tomorrow's Internet blackout, along with many others.