The Web Wins: SOPA & PIPA Now Dead in the Water

By , Published January 20, 2012

The controversial SOPA and PIPA bills are dead – at least in name.

The ‘death’ of PIPA (Protect IP Act) (at least in its current form) was announced in a statement by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex).

“I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy,” Lamar said in his statement. ”It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.”

PIPA’s partner in crime, SOPA, was delayed earlier this week by House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Cali) who has called for ‘greater consensus’ on the reach of the bill before any hearing should be considered.

Dead ≠ Dead

But is this really the end for both bills?

Probably not. Just like the plots to many of the films release by the entertainment groups behind the bills, the dead have knack for rising; the luddite industries and their lobby groups are unlikely to give up on reigning in the internet quite as easily as this.

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  • Anonymous

    Thank you Internet!!

  • Anonymous

    Power to the people ^^

  • McP

    “foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.”Seriously ?????

    • http://openid-provider.appspot.com/TheMerkinman Merk

      Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children??

      • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_L4AIKW26DEAQMJ42YKD6ZINK7U Bam

        No thank-U

    • Anonymous

      Are you aware that Brad and Angelina had to fire their children’s private French teacher because of the recent recession that we won’t be able to recover from until all of the “foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.” keep doing it! Do you really think that having 7 children is cheap? So yes, SERIOUSLY! :D

      • Jesse

        Oh my god! The Angelina’s children don’t have a private French teacher. That is so sad. :(

        • Anonymous

          *cries*

        • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_IK3GYJHISHUG7XCTGBTMOXTHWU Trigger

          I think the bradjolina children do…. lol

      • http://mark-y-a.myopenid.com/ Marky

        Outsourcing in India + Asian countries = thousands to millions of jobs
        Production/manufacturing of goods in China + other Asian countries = thousands to millions of jobs
        Outsourcing of Nurses + other skilled workers from other countries = thousands to millions of jobs

        Of course what is left in the USA?

        “And they blame Obama.”

        Oh yeah, warmongering!!! Right. :D

        • Anonymous

          Outsourcing of nurses?  Are you serious?  There has been a nursing shortage in the US for as long as I can remember.
          If you mean by “blame obama” lower labor costs then yes that would be more than accurate.  If you want to lay blame for the loss of manufacturing then you need look no further than the unions, the federal government and the public schools.  High school graduates cannot perform the simple task of making change without the aid of a computer.  That is simple math.  It costs GM nearly twice as much per hour to manufacture a car than Toyota.  Yet none of the geniuses in the obama administration is capable of recognizing that as a problem.

          • Anonymous

            The problem is much more complex than that.
            Toyota eliminates the very need for unions since it directly engages the employees (and hires them with reasonable wages).  GM’s problem is legacy retirement payments, not unions.

            Also, GM and Toyota both have plants in the US, Toyota just knows that if they spend a bit more upfront to train an employee they make money with a more efficient workforce.

            The education is partly down because of “no child left behind” which sounded good, but ended up holding back kids who excelled and punished schools that just didn’t have the federal funding to begin with to address the problem.

            Obama in this last regard did well in increasing the education budget.

            of course, the rabbit hole goes much further on, but anything from here and I’ll have to start citing sources :P

          • http://mark-y-a.myopenid.com/ Marky

            Oh so you figured it out. I wonder why the rest hasn’t? It’s so simple, right? :)

            And the problems didn’t start with Obama. As far back as Clinton I’d bet on that. All problems are just starting to manifest now.

        • Dawid

          Since when outsourcing is stealing?

    • Anton Fosselius

      I am offended, I would never sell it.

    • Gabriel Rousseau

      So can I download a movie and not sell it?? =D

      • http://twitter.com/raulvalino Raúl Valiño

        In Spain that is perfectly legal. As long as you do not sell it, you have no problems.

    • http://twitter.com/Azthma Azthma

      It’s gonna get ugly if they continue formulating such expressions. 

  • http://solomich.ru Egor Solovev

    Congratulations!!

  • Jesse

    So the war is finally over, we won! Don’t dare to mess with us again, Uncle Sam.

    • Santorum George

      puhlease. stop smoking crack. While you were sleeping I re-introduced this bill as an amendment to the “Protection of Idle Email Addresses Act”

      • Jesse

        actually I was drunk. So please, forgive me. The vodka is affecting my brain.

    • Ruben Bakker

      No. We won the battle, not the war.

  • Will Kromer

    Liberty!!!

  • http://ad1987.blogspot.com/ Abhisek

    “…
    by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex)”
    I read T-Rex. :P

    • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_IH4OBL3AGQV2WPP2OGHZRRKG64 Helder

      Me too! ;) Wouldn’t it be nicer just to say Republican or Democrat instead of this almost unintelligible Zip-code like thingy?
      Anyway, hope these bills remain dead. They might come back for the zombie apocalipse.

      • Anonymous

        I stole the pic above to use as a wallpaper.  Cool.

        • my screen is too damn big

          I wish I could use that as a wallpaper, it would look like crap at 1920×1200

          • http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ Joey-Elijah Sneddon

            I’ll make a big-ass version 

      • Richard

        Ironicly enough, someone said the exact opposite when he did that in a previous bit of news. They got very offended when he stated what political party they were from, saying that it casts the whole party in a bad light. Cant see how this is any different though, if anything it just gets more specific and casts a state’s members of a party in a bad light. Cant please everybody haha.
        This is great news though! Although it sounds like were not out of the woods yet… I wonder how they’ll manage to bring these bills back?

        • Anonymous

          It’s not over “It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem…”

          Just another way to retreat, regroup and retry.

      • Anonymous

        It’s not zip-code.

        It’s the Party (e.g. ‘R’ or ‘D’ for Republican or Democrat, respectively), and then the 2-letter abbreviation for the state (e.g. ‘TX’ for Texas)

    • Anonymous

      That would have been Marc Bolan then.

  • http://www.nobudget.it NoBudget

    wait, an anonymous tweet says it is not true.

  • Daniel Butler

    reining in. reining refers to controlling a horse.

    reigning is ruling over, which makes sense in the article but not in the phrase reining in

  • Tor Djärv

    Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

    • Attributor

      You forgot the attribution “Winston Churchill”. There fixed it for ya.

  • Anonymous

    Don’t get your hopes up.  They “shelved” SOPA once before, then announced it wasn’t dead less than a week later.  This isn’t over, and anyone that thinks this is a victory needs to celebrate a little less and help ensure that these terrible bills really do die. 

    As it stands, SOPA may be poised to be tacked onto the end of a bill to fight against child pornographers, which no one will vote against because of the perceived implications.

    We’re not home and dry yet, people.  We can’t even be said to be home and vigorously toweling off. 

    • Anonymous

      Remember, we need to burn the remains of those bills (like zombies) >:D

  • kostas woods

    PIPA means smoking device or blowjob in Greek!!

    • Gabriel Rousseau

      PIPA means kite in Brasil… And just kite.

      • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_IH4OBL3AGQV2WPP2OGHZRRKG64 Helder

        That’s funny, pipa in Portugal is a wine barrel. Maybe the PIPA proponents had too much of it. :)
        Kite is papagaio, btw, same as the bird.

      • kostas woods

        Greek language and slang is always creative. We can invent words “on the fly” for just about anything.

      • Anonymous

        …and ‘piece of trash’ in swedish, appropriately.

      • Iva Kiwi Sučić

        In Croatian it’s water tap :D

    • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_FD5M7R6NP7VXXFS4FHYYAGCHPM James

      SOPA means stick or beating in Turkish ;)

    • daas88

      In spanish, SOPA means soup and PIPA means barrel, smoking pipe, or a fat belly (slang).

  • http://www.mrericsir.com MrEricSir

    Of course it’s not really “over.”  Ever ~5 years the content cartel gets another proposal before congress and it’s back to square one.

    So far, every one of these awful proposed laws was protested on the internet; this seems to be the first time the internet protests made an impact.

    • Sersious Dog

      It’ll be coming back riding on the coat tails of “Cockaroach Santorum Health Act”, in which every one will agree that it’s not cricket to have websites about breeding radioactive resistant pests.

      • http://www.mrericsir.com MrEricSir

        Please, don’t mention santorum (NSFW) just after I ate.  Feeling queasy…

        • http://twitter.com/marcusklaas MarcusKlaasDeVries

          Pfftt, do you really consider a silly definition NSFW?

          • http://www.mrericsir.com MrEricSir

            You’re right, it’s more like NSWE (Not Safe While Eating.)

  • Barak Osama

    it ain’t over till the fat lady sings…

    • http://www.twm-kd.com/ BigWhale

       Is she performing her own songs or just using someone’s work? Someone should sue the fat lady!

      • Anonymous

        I’m sure Apple’s already on it ;)

    • kjameson

      Yogi Berra says “It ain’t over ’til it’s over”.

  • http://ihashacks.wordpress.com/ Ihashacks

    I just found my new wallpaper! Can has zombie.xcf/.svg for bigger size?

    • Anonymous

      Yeah.  A bigger size would be nice.

  • http://www.twm-kd.com/ BigWhale

    SOPA is like an antagonist in a B production horror movie. You have to kill it ten times before it’s dead. Then it comes back in 15 more sequels.

  • http://twitter.com/howythegeek Howy

    Victory for the freedom of speech! :D
    Let’s just hope they won’t try the people of the internet’s strength against these kinds of decisions again.
    But they did shut down Megaupload. :|

    • http://profile.yahoo.com/2COPA2BCYUAH7X6YWWJ6DJW66A Andrew Smith

      here here! I already miss that site. I never download any large files from that site because their site was kind of slow. I hope anonymous takes down Kiwi sites because Kiwis were just TOOLS for the Americans. I also want to see the MPAA and RIAA reimburse America for the costs involved in this.

  • http://profile.yahoo.com/2COPA2BCYUAH7X6YWWJ6DJW66A Andrew Smith

    No, they took down Megaupload because they were an easy target. The US does whatever they want to do. When I was a boy during the COLD WAR, they tried to make Russia the 7 headed beast. In truth, Russia never was this, but rather, the US.

    • http://twitter.com/Azthma Azthma

      Absolutely. DId you see that they could not take a thatch from BitTorent for example because its investors are known big companies like Microsoft, Dell…Etc

    • http://profiles.google.com/ezr.ladislav Ladislav Ezr

      Srsly? I think that you can’t even imagine how big and evil that seven headed beast was…

    • Alexander QR

      Go watch rembo and then think of what you just said.

  • http://profile.yahoo.com/2COPA2BCYUAH7X6YWWJ6DJW66A Andrew Smith

    And the UK should be ashamed of themselves for sending a young man to America to face an unfair trial over copywright violations! I think it’s absurd that someone with no ties to America can be sent there to face a Kangaroo court. Are you the UK or the USA?

    • Anonymous

      gross abuse of extradition laws … “piracy” used to be tried in civil courts and as such had to be done in the area of the accused.

      However, it is now marked as a criminal act, and as such under the jurisdiction of extradition laws.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_L4AIKW26DEAQMJ42YKD6ZINK7U Bam

    We must always be on guard against the GOP hoard.
    http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/the-author-of-sopa-is-a-copyright-violator

    • Anonymous

      It was the GOP that effectively killed the bills genius.  And it was one of your beloved democrats working for the mpaa who was pushing both bills.

      • kenjite kenjite

        BULL!!!!

        IT WAS A REPUBLICAN THAT PINNED THE BILL!!

  • Do We or Don’t We Know

    So OMG Ubuntu writes a post (that was later completely removed) explaining why they didn’t go dark, with the presumption that all its visitors and readers already knew about SOPA and PIPA, but decides to post about the death of the bills, which all us should know, by their logic, has already occurred.

  • Anonymous

    So the day before SOPA and PIPA are declared dead the Feds takedown Megaupload and are seeking to extradite people who are not US citizens from New Zealand. I wouldn’t really call this a victory. Just another example of the wool over the eyes of the American people. Keep everyone bickering with each other over politics or technology or free-speech or “Occupy-Wallstreet”. In the mean time the power class in this country are running around behind the scenes doing whatever they want to do and keeping their wealth in the process. Ron Bennington said it best when he said this country a bunch of f’ing rubes and the carnies are running the show.

    • http://www.mrericsir.com MrEricSir

      Way to completely miss the point…

      • Anonymous

        I think you missed my point. While everyone is patting each other on the back that these internet protests were a success, the Feds went ahead and shut down Megaupload on the same day. The bills may be dead, but there are very real breaches of internet freedom occurring all the time. 

        • http://www.mrericsir.com MrEricSir

          Um, the protest wasn’t over whether piracy should be illegal; the protest was about censoring the internet.

          Are you unable to tell the difference between the two?

  • STOP PIPA

    Hello everyone,
    try to open http://megaupload.com and see what FBI done to it.

  • http://myswiat.wordpress.com/ mariusz

    SOPA and PIPA = ACTA in UE 
    And this month, some countries will sign the legislation in the EU. The fight forInternet freedom is not over yet.

    • insanelyapple

      ACTA to nie to samo co PIPA i SOPA; podobne kwestie jedynie porusza.

    • Anonymous

      SOPA != ACTA

      Countries can join on A Voluntary base,
      which means opt-in,
      don’t want, opt-out

  • Hein Hanssen

    Thank God those silly laws don’t come to action.
    The main problem in the whole debate: music and film industry wants to earn more on digital content than they ever did when the world was still mainly analog. For this reason restrictions like DRM and CSS were developed and now that we have the industry we know a way around these restrictions (solely imposed on us to provide the industry with larger profits) they want to criminalize the consumers on a large scale. 

    They do not want you to share your extremely over prized ebooks (like you always did with your paperbacks), they don’t want you to see series or movies that were not (yet) released for your region (they just don’t care). But if you dare to download a series or movie that’s not (yet) available they want to go to court with you and preferable get you locked away. What they want is world domination: the music and film industry want to set the price as a high as possible and for this they want to ‘employ’ governments to pass laws that will help them achieve their goal of world domination.

  • Joel dos Santos Almeida

    I still want megaupload back :’(

  • Daniel Rodriguez-Padilla

    The thing we have to worry about now, especially for those who live in the EU is the ACTA. To those who don’t know what it is here is a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=citzRjwk-sQ (This video has subtitles if for those whose native language isn’t English.)

  • http://profiles.google.com/sq6gtt Teodor Orzechowski

    What about ACTA? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement ) This is global version of SOPA.

  • http://koffeehaus.myopenid.com/ Koffeehaus

    That is good news. Now I am waiting to see if new computers running Win8 will come with a locked BIOS

  • http://yourethemannowdog.com Shasta McShasta

    Keep in mind that it’s only a small victory.  It’s definitely a win, but we have to keep things in perspective.  The shutdown of Megaupload proves that they really didn’t need these bills anyway.  That said, I’ve never seen such widespread support and unity across the Internet as I did while we rallied against these bills.  It confirmed the best part of the Internet for me:  it truly allows the free and open exchange of information, where differences in government and language are only as limiting as we allow them to be.  The fight to preserve this open web is only just beginning, but with the actions that I’ve seen over the past few weeks, I have faith that we can eventually win.

  • Blackoutworm

    Why do people keep saying it is dead?
    Sometimes I think the internet is full of retards.
    Posts like these will make people stop focusing on SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and all these bills, which is what they need to get these type of bills through.
    Just because the actual SOPA bill is gone, does not mean anything.

    • Benjamin

      Did you actually read the article?

    • AConcernedCitizen

      The picture is a friggin zombie for a reason. I think people will catch on without reading the article that they’ll try acts like PIPA/SOPA/COICA/ACTA again.

  • Oliverbeard

    Lets hope
    they stay down

  • Anonymous

    So we have the problem of copyright holders who want money off a move and consumers who either pay for it or don’t care about paying. So, let the company do all the cinema and dvd and everything with copyright until all the fanfare dies off. Let them make money off it and hold their copyright over it. But once it’s all finished, like 6 months in, release it to the public domain for everyone to watch when it’s not making any money. Copyright holders are happy and poor people are happy.

 
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