No SOPA Vote Until 2012

jfruhlinger writes "A victory, or a just a breather? The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee has postponed further debate on the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) until after Congress' holiday break. At the urging of some SOPA opponents, Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican and committee chairman, said Friday he will consider a hearing or a classified briefing on the bill's impact on cybersecurity." Update: 12/17 04:28 GMT by T : "Or not," as an anonymous reader comments below. "Despite the fact that Congress was supposed to be out of session until the end of January, the Judiciary Committee has just announced plans to come back to continue the markup this coming Wednesday. This is rather unusual and totally unnecessary. But it shows just how desperate Hollywood is to pass this bill as quickly as possible, before the momentum of opposition builds up even further."

Comments

Re:Its a battle win, maybe not victory.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or alternatively, they're hoping that if they let it lie through the holidays, the furor will die down and they can pass it on a day during the Retardican primary votes when the media's too busy covering Rick Perry's latest stupid statement or Michele Bachmann's latest bigoted spew, moving the SOPA vote to page 8.

Translation

[girlintraining]

Translation:
We're catching a lot of shit about this, and so we've told our campaign sponsors we have to table this until after the election. Once the election is over, we'll ram it down their throats, promise.

xoxoxo,
Your Elected Officials.

Anything is only temporary.

[bky1701]

The issue here is threefold. First, that money is allowed to influence politics. As long as that is true, those without money lose - and lose constantly. Second, the idea that ideas can be property. Creating artificial forms of property has repeatedly proven to widen wealth disparity and harm society at large. The very idea of property is a problem, but physical property is a necessary evil. "Intellectual property" is not. We need to not be creating and extending this "intellectual property," but rather we need to be rolling it back or abolishing it. Third, that censorship is seen as a reasonable way to deal with people in other countries doing things that are illegal here. We all criticized China and Iran for censoring communications which were illegal in their countries; why is it suddenly alright when it is for the sake of American profit? Because it is not, and if you believe so, it is only because you either stand to profit from said censorship, or are a fool being misled by those who do.

Re:Anything is only temporary.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you just spent 2 million dollars of your own and investors money making a movie, the idea that you'd then let people just take it for free would seem ridiculous to you too. A movie or a song isn't just 'an idea', it represents (potentially) a lot of hard work and a lot of money.

Your desire for profits DOES NOT justify why those "ideas" should be arbitrarily declared "property" and have government-enforced, rights-infringing monopolies slapped on them. If you can't figure out a way to make money without resorting to censorship, then you shouldn't be spending investors' money and you shouldn't even be in business! It's simply not the government's job to provide you with a business model and censorship powers, period.

Re:Its a battle win, maybe not victory.

[bky1701]

Most likely, they will re-propose it under a new name, with some of the more outlandish clauses removed, and pass it with a super-majority. Basically, follow the original plan: ask for the universe, settle for the earth.

Hate SOPA - but hate the petition...

[SuperKendall]

I dislike SOPA with the burning fire of a thousand suns.

But amending the Constitution to claim the "internet is an unalienable right" strikes me as a really bad idea, and very vague.

Amusingly it would also seem to prevent Network Neutrality, which I would be in favor of - but again I think amending the constitution is a bad way to go about this, and pretty certainly requires way more votes than is possible to make happen.

Far better than signing this petition, call or write your house members and let them know you DO NOT WANT SOPA in any form. Not a "fixed" up bill. Nothing.