SOPA and PIPA both KOed (For Now)

Splendid news today from the front lines of the Internet - both SOPA and PIPA have been knocked off the current Congress schedule. Both bills have been tabled indefinitely. The Internet has won.

I will most definitely post additional updates on this very important topic should the need rise again - and because the entertainment industry is likely to try some other way in the future of stifling new technology, this is a good possibility.

Here is part of an email I received from Fight For The Future, one of the sites whose petitions I signed on Wednesday. Tiffiniy Cheng, you have the floor...

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Hi everyone!

A big hurrah to you!!!!! We’ve won for now -- SOPA and PIPA were dropped by Congress today -- the votes we’ve been scrambling to mobilize against have been cancelled.

The largest online protest in history has fundamentally changed the game. You were heard.

On January 18th, 13 million of us took the time to tell Congress to protect free speech rights on the internet. Hundreds of millions, maybe a billion, people all around the world saw what we did on Wednesday. See the amazing numbers here and tell everyone what you did.

This was unprecedented. Your activism may have changed the way people fight for the public interest and basic rights forever.

The MPAA (the lobby for big movie studios which created these terrible bills) was shocked and seemingly humbled. “‘This was a whole new different game all of a sudden,’ MPAA Chairman and former Senator Chris Dodd told the New York Times. ‘[PIPA and SOPA were] considered by many to be a slam dunk.’”

“'This is altogether a new effect,' Mr. Dodd said, comparing the online movement to the Arab Spring. He could not remember seeing 'an effort that was moving with this degree of support change this dramatically' in the last four decades, he added." We're indebted to everyone who helped in the beginning of this movement -- you, and all the sites that went out on a limb to protest in November -- Boing Boing and Mozilla Foundation (and thank you Tumblr, 4chan)! And the grassroots groups -- Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Demand Progress, CDT, and many more.

SOPA and PIPA will likely return in some form.  But when they do, we'll be ready. We changed the game this fall, and we're not gonna stop.

P.S. China's internet censorship system reminds us why the fight for democratic principles is so important:

"Fittingly, perhaps, the discussion has unfolded on Weibo, the Twitter-like micro-blogging site that has a team of censors on staff to trim posts with sensitive political content. That is the arrangement that opponents of the bill have suggested would be required of American sites if they are compelled to police their users’ content for copyright violations. On Weibo, joking about SOPA’s similarities to Chinese censorship was sensitive enough that some posts on the subject were almost certainly deleted (though it can be hard to know)."

After Chinese Web users got over the strangeness of hearing Americans debate the merits of screening the Web for objectionable content, they marveled at the American response. Commentator Liu Qingyan wrote:

‘We should learn something from the way these American Internet companies protested against SOPA and PIPA. A free and democratic society depends on every one of us caring about politics and fighting for our rights. We will not achieve it by avoiding talk about politics.’"

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Again, my thanks to anyone who helped out these last few days, and I hope that we can repeat the performance if needed somewhere down the line. This is what freedom is all about.

All right, enough talk about Internet freedom for now - next post I make is the story of how I found my pet snake!