Both SOPA and PIPA postponed, but not dead

Source: Liberty Confidential

Note that the bills aren’t “dead.” They’ve been set aside for a while. But while it’s not over, this is indeed great news.

The House’s legislation was shelved last week, as dissent began to gain momentum. It wasn’t just us “regular folks” who were voicing opposition to the bill, but companies both big and small were voicing opposition to SOPA. I suspect the Republican-controlled House shelved their version to see what happened with the Senate.

Well, the Democrat-controlled senate didn’t have much luck either.

Here’s a quick run-down on the SOPA Strike that took place on the 18th:

• 4 top-10 US sites participated
• 13 top-100 US sites participated
• at least 115,000 small and medium sites participated in strike

Google launched a petition. Wikipedia voted to shut itself off.  Senators’ websites went down just from the sheer surge of voters trying to write them.   NYC and SF geeks had protests that packed city blocks.

Approaching Monday’s crucial Senate vote there were 19 25 more than 30Senators against PIPA, and counting…

Last week there were only 5 not supporting PIPA.

As I said already, some of the senators no longer supporting the bill were originally co-sponsors of the bill! So, yes, they were freaked out by what they saw on Wednesday. As Julianne Pepitone wrote at CNN Money, “When the entire Internet gets angry, Congress takes notice.”

It just takes just 41 solid “no” votes to permanently stall PIPA in the Senate, which is why the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)  suddenly postponed the votefrom Monday to some later date.

Ross Lincoln at Game Front made this prediction: “Given how effective opposition has been, it is all but guaranteed that there will be no ‘wider’ agreement on solutions to the problem of piracy, at least in the short term. This means that for all intents and purposes, SOPA and PIPA as we know them are dead.”

He also points out that the supporters seems pretty adamant about having these horrific proposals pass into law. So they could be back in a somehow amended format. In which case, expect a lot of smoke, mirrors, and bullshit.

I worry that these proposals could easily be inserted into some fat piece of legislation. After all, we have politicians in office that will astonishingly admit that they don’t read the crap they vote on. They even use that as a reason not to bother debating the legislation.

So Congress can pass it, and the White House can sign it as part of some unrelated way and then say “Oops! I didn’t even know it was there.” This is a handy way of washing their hands of the whole mess. They’ve done it before.

(Ask yourself this: If our elected officials don’t read that legislation, who the hell’s writing it? After all, isn’t that the job of the elected officials?)

Guess that’s my prediction for 2012. PIPA/SOPA will be passed, and signed, as part of a larger body of legislation. Sorry to be such a great big pessimist.

Original post at Liberty Confidential