SOPA Vote Rescheduled For This Week, Attempts Silent Passage
Despite what you may have heard at the end of last week, the vote for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is not delayed until 2012 nor is it delayed "indefinitely" – instead members of Congress hoping to run the act through a vote without any more internet-based campaigns to stop it have secretly rescheduled for the middle of this week. This blacklist legislation is also known as the PROTECT IP act in the Senate, and what today's news means is that the Judiciary Committee that was said to have convened until the end of January to re-work the act so that it better fit with the wants and needs of the VAST majority of free internet users is now going to vote this week instead. Opponents of the act will not be pleased.
It was in a TechDirt article that it first seemed to appear in comments that the vote had been re-scheduled not long after the first re-scheduling to make the vote in a quick and silent manner. CA-49 worker and House GOP watchdog Darrell Issa noted once that the vote would likely be Wednesday and that he'd received confirmation from Republican leader Eric Cantor that votes may take place Monday and maybe Tuesday. There is only one reason for this vote to be moved back into 2011: sidestepping moves like An open letter to Washington as signed by internet OGs like Sergey Brin and Mitchell Baker.
You can take action by contacting your state representative with this easy to use form or just call them up if you've got their number handy. H.R. 3261: Stop Online Piracy Act can be read in its entirety at Goftrack.us, complete with gems like this one: "To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes." Seem like a pretty big open space there? You are not alone in thinking this. Take action now or big business owners will be able to request and receive the ability to censor pages and content you post to the internet without due process. That's the long and short of it.
[via Reddit]