The House Judiciary Committee, while considering whether to send the Stop Online Piracy Act to the House floor, adjourned earlier today with no new vote date set. It’s too early to yell “Victory!”, but at least we can breathe a gentle sigh of relief before the discussions start again during next year.
To be honest, I’m more than just relieved, I’m both impressed and humbled over the massive support the opposition of this act has received across the Internet. Not many times does the full force of the Internet rise up in unison for or against something, but this has definitely been one of those times. I’m sure that the massive opposition that SOPA received was a large contributing factor to the postponement of the vote.
The proceedings on Friday, which came after an 11 hour long hearing on Thursday, were halted when Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz suggested that the session should be postponed until technical experts could be brought in to testify whether any any security risks would be created by making changes to the Internet’s domain name system. Personally, I think this is the wrong question to ask, but it’s definitely a valid one, considering questions about DNS-SEC and so on.
Let me just put it as simply as possible. If you’re trying to pass legislation that is opposed by Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, LinkedIn, eBay, Mozilla Corporation, the Brookings Institution, the Wikimedia Foundation, Reporters Without Borders, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, and the Human Rights Watch, you’re probably doing something wrong.
Or not. Despite the fact that Congress was supposed to be out of session until the end of January, the Judiciary Committee has just announced plans to come back to continue the markup this coming Wednesday. This is rather unusual and totally unnecessary. But it shows just how desperate Hollywood is to pass this bill as quickly as possible, before the momentum of opposition builds up even further.
(via Techdirt)