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ALBANY, N.Y. – Co-sponsors of the PIPA bill, Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York), indicated via Facebook that the bills will be pulled and reworked after intense public pushback. The bills were set to go to vote next week.
“You've been heard. PIPA has been pulled so we can find a better solution,” Schumer said Friday morning. Within an hour the comment garnered 370 “likes,” 90 comments and 98 shares.
Comments on Schumer's status are continual, and range from victorious to vitriolic. Just one week ago the senator was using the same venue to emphasize the importance of protecting U.S. intellectual property.
The Protect IP Act, and the Stop Online Piracy Act, PIPA and SOPA respectively, caused waves of protests across the Internet, and across the state of New York. Google blacked out its name, Flickr darkened shared photos, Reddit was taken down and Wikipedia was unusable. The New York City offices of co-sponsors Senators Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand were protested.
Tech companies have argued that provisions in the bill, including the Domain Name System (DNS) provision, would create an Internet black list in its attempts to stifle ongoing foreign piracy. Search engines would be forced to exclude search result links to websites which carry pirated content, and could be on the hook for facilitating theft of intellectual property. Many tech bloggers and companies say sites like YouTube would go dark immediately, because it would be impossible to police the millions of videos uploaded every day.
Tech companies have also said that the congressional supporters of these bills do not understand the architecture of the Internet, and the implications of the bill’s broad language. The bills once enjoyed bipartisan support, buoyed by content creators such as the Motion Picture Association of America.
Congressional support withered from the embattled bills since Wednesday, and the future of SOPA and PIPA is uncertain at best. It is unknown how long it could take to rework the bills, and the pair has now become the focal point of public and Internet media scrutiny.
Gillibrand called the public outcry against the bills “democracy in action,” on her Facebook. Her status read, “Make no mistake, we must act to protect the theft of intellectual property that costs our economy billions in revenue -- but we must get it right without unintended consequences that could stifle the Internet.”
Comments (2)
Job market is in the tank, housing market crushed, incomes down, trillions in debt. These two useless media hacks are pushing this nonsense? We should be ashamed of ourselves as citizens for electing these morons.
Maybe if Senator Schumer had done the same for the Heath Care Bill, we would be in better shape today. The problem with our senators is they don't look before they leap. They should look at the long term consequences of their bills.
They keep adding more and more bills when there are laws already on the books that cover it. Lets try enforcing the ones already there. That would be a good start instead of putting more limitations on our freedoms. Every NEW law reduces our freedom. We should also go through the old laws and eliminate the ones that either don't work or are totally useless.