Internet blackout success? House and Senate leaders announced today that action on the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) will be delayed.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that he would delay a vote on PIPA, while SOPA sponsor Rep. Lamar Smith said the House Judiciary Committee would also postpone action on his bill.
PIPA was scheduled to be taken up by the Senate on Tuesday, Jan. 24 at 2:15pm. But "in light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday's vote," Sen. Reid said in a statement.
Those recent events include a Wednesday Web blackout, during which several high-profile sites, from Reddit to Wikipedia, went dark in protest of PIPA and SOPA. Other companies, like Google, included signage on their homepages in opposition to the bills.
Reid did not indicate when PIPA would come to the floor, except to say that both sides have made "good progress in recent days," and that he is "optimistic that we can reach a compromise in the coming weeks."
"There is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved. Counterfeiting and piracy cost the American economy billions of dollars and thousands of jobs each year, with the movie industry alone supporting over 2.2 million jobs," Reid said. "We must take action to stop these illegal practices. We live in a country where people rightfully expect to be fairly compensated for a day's work, whether that person is a miner in the high desert of Nevada, an independent band in New York City, or a union worker on the back lots of a California movie studio."
Reid praised the work that Sen. Patrick Leahy, who introduced PIPA, put into the bill. "I encourage him to continue engaging with all stakeholders to forge a balance between protecting Americans' intellectual property, and maintaining openness and innovation on the Internet."
Sen. Leahy said he respected Reid's decision, but suggested lawmakers who forced the delay "made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem."
"When I first came to Congress, it was the practice of the Senate to debate competing ideas to address such a problem; regrettably, that is not the practice today," Leahy said.
In the House, meanwhile, Rep. Smith said "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."
Until, the Judiciary Committee will postpone consideration of SOPA "until there is wider agreement on a solution," Smith's office said.
PIPA is designed to go after overseas, "rogue" Web sites that traffic in counterfeit or stolen goods, whether that's purses and prescription drugs or DVDs and MP3s. The bill would allow the Justice Department to obtain a court order and take down the offending sites and require that they be stripped from search engine results, among other things.
SOPA is similar in nature, except that Rep. Smith recently stripped DNS blocking from the measure. Sen. Leahy indicated that he too had concerns about that provision, but at this point, that section remains in PIPA.
Opponents, however, argue that SOPA and PIPA are too broad and could harm legitimate Web sites, prompting Wednesday's blackout.
Today's announcement, meanwhile, also come one day after the DOJ shut down file-sharing site Megaupload for massive copyright infringement. Hackers responded to that shutdown with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against the Web sites for the DOJ, FBI, RIAA, MPAA, and Universal Music.
For more, see the Top 5 Objections to SOPA, PIPA and PCMag analysts' take on the bills, as well as the slideshow below, which features screen shots from Web sites that participated in Wednesday's blackout.