stop pipa and sopa

SOPA and PIPA dead, for now

[[Note: Scroll to the bottom for TL;DR]]

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.

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.
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tl;dr: SOPA and PIPA have been postponed.

Good work guys!

Continue to let the group grow incase it ever wants to come back! :)