House and Senate leaders abandoned plans to move on SOPA and PIPA on Friday — the surest sign yet that a wave of online protests have killed the controversial anti-piracy legislation for now and maybe forever. SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said his committee won’t take up the bill as planned next month — and that he’d have to “wait until there is wider agreement on a solution†before moving forward. Continue Reading Text Size -+reset Listen Latest on POLITICO HHS move scores no points on right Labor civil war over Keystone XL SOPA foes: 'Internet 1, Congress 0' Wis. recall feed draws thousands New role for young voters POLITICO Influence: Catching heat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, meanwhile, said he was calling off a cloture vote on PIPA he’d scheduled for Tuesday. Reid tried to put on a brave face, saying in a statement that he was optimistic that progress could be made in the coming weeks. But there's no mistaking what happened. Many of the Senate bill’s co-sponsors have since come out against it, leaving Reid a no-win choice: Go forward with the cloture vote he'd planned for Tuesday and lose, or send the bill off into back-burner purgatory. PIPA sponsor Patrick Leahy got the message — and he wasn’t happy about it. In a steaming response to Reid's announcement, the Vermont Democrat said Internet thieves in China and Russia "are smugly watching how the United States Senate decided it was not even worth debating how to stop the overseas criminals from draining our economy.†And he didn’t stop there. Leahy said “the day will come when the senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem.†The double-barrel decisions to punt on the bill capped an extraordinary week of public pressure — and an extraordinary reversal of fortunes for Hollywood, whose lobbyists seemed to think they were on cruise control to passage of bills aimed at protecting their content from online thieves. Over the weekend, the White House expressed concerns about the legislation. Over the next several days, co-sponsor after co-sponsor jumped ship. And Thursday night, the four remaining GOP presidential candidates all said they’d oppose the bills as currently drafted. The sudden shift left Smith and Reid no choice but to punt. And the tech interests who fanned the flames of protests were quick to celebrate the decisions. Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71720.html#ixzz1k7j5guPl
Not sure where you are getting your information from. The bill appears to be on hold; I have not heard anything about it being dead, or gone FOREVER! and nothing is forever. There are big corporations that want to do away with their internet competitors, and that means every website on the internet that does not relate to them; 2nd hand websites, discount websites, blogs, classifieds, DP, Ebay, CL, Sitemap...You buy a $2 part on the internet when the company sells that same part for $25, and this makes the internet their competitor; These compaines want you to buy direct, not 2nd hand. If you ask me; I think they need to use the laws that are currently on the books and go after pirate websites w/ due process, rather then putting together some BS Piracy Act bill that would remove all of your due process rights.
In other words, they are NOT dead. They have just kicked the ball down the road UNTIL they can figure out a way so SNEAK IT INTO ANOTHER BILL THAT THE PRESIDENT CANNOT VETO.
That is exactly how the govt works, now that shit has hit the fan, and people know what they really want to do, they will back down for now... but I assure you that the rich and powerful will not just roll over and say, oh gosh, you got me, you win, bla, bla...they will let some time go by, and they will try to get this into some other bill, and try to get it passed as soon as they can before the public can respond, just because it does not go forward now, does not mean it is dead forever; The rich and powerful do not roll that easily, I assure you that...