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No SOPA Vote Until 2012

Posted by timothy on from the just-when-you-least-expect-it dept.

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."

2 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. OR NOT...? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111216/11102617108/sopa-markup-runs-out-time-likely-delayed-until-2012.shtml

    Update.... Or not. 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.

  2. Amazing by ixnaay · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Somehow I've missed this issue over the last couple of months (I read /. daily, my memory must be getting worse than I thought). At first look, the bill reads like a bad joke. The wording of this bill as it stands now will allow the take down of any website which provides user forums / comments. Simply visit the forum, post a link to download copy-written material or other 'illegal' data (which covers a tremendous amount of ground), and the owner of the website has committed a felony and immediately loses all advertising income.The owner is then guilty - you can't even say 'guilty until proven innocent' - you've likely lost your main income, their reputation among 'reputable' businesses is gone, and their opportunities for defense and damages seem pretty insignificant as stated in the bill.

    The user forum example just scratches the surface of absurd possibilities.

    Amazon selling a book which could facilitate access to whatever a corporation declares is 'illegal' data,e.g. computing book which touches on bit-torrents.
    Services like Pandora (you can record it on your home PC) or Google Music (obviously)
    Any data backup company (oops, had illegal data on my backed up hard drive - bye bye Carbonite).

    Did I miss something? I don't see where in this bill that any line is drawn between a site like Pirate's Bay and the examples above.