The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the PROTECT-IP Act, known as PIPA, have both been postponed from being voted on in the House and Senate respectively.
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the author of SOPA, said today that he will postpone any further actionon the bill until compromises were reached.
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said in a tweetthat “in light of recent events”, he has, “decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote” on the PIPA bill.
An impending vote on SOPA triggered widespread protestsleaving hundreds of millions of Web users without access to their favourite sites.
Though both bills have been shelved, both SOPA and PIPA arefar from dead. What is clear, however, is that the bills will not return in their current form.
A statement from the White House last week made it clear that the President could veto such billsshould they pass across his desk if Congress passed them.
By the numbers: over 75,000 websites were blacked out during Wednesday’s online protest, with 160 million people seeing Wikipedia’s blacked out pages alone. 4.5 million people signed Google’s anti-SOPA petition, and an estimated 2–4 million anti-SOPA and PIPA messages were tweeted.
This isn’t Washington losing. This is Washington listening to the people that it represents. The delay of any action on SOPA and PIPA is a victory for us all, from news publications to ordinary folks on the street.
Nice work, everyone.
