Using the Internet to save the Internet: The SOPA success story

Image from Leah Jones on Flickr

It's clear: online action can be hugely effective when people participate and spread the word. We know this from experience, and from something unprecedented that happened this week. Over 13 millon people and over 70,000 websites—including Wikipedia, Google, and Reddit—stood up against SOPA, a piece of U.S. legislation that would have done a lot of damage to free expression and innovation online. We at OpenMedia.ca also blacked out our site and set up an online action.

The protest succeeded in changing political opinion, and effectively stopping SOPA. Our fight can succeed too.

The fight against SOPA was a success; our fight will be too. The Stop The Squeeze campaign, for one, is growing at an amazing rate. Be a part of the success to come by adding your name to the petition and spreading the word.

For those of you interested in hearing more about SOPA, here's an infographic that describes some incredible stats, and here's an article about the death of SOPA for your reading pleasure:

SOPA and PIPA dead – for now
By Jennifer Martinez for Politico

House and Senate leaders abandoned plans to move on SOPA and PIPA on Friday — the surest sign yet that a wave of online protests have killed the controversial anti-piracy legislation for now and maybe forever.

SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said his committee won’t take up the bill as planned next month — and that he’d have to “wait until there is wider agreement on a solution” before moving forward.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, meanwhile, said he was calling off a cloture vote on PIPA he’d scheduled for Tuesday.

Reid tried to put on a brave face, saying in a statement that he was optimistic that progress could be made in the coming weeks. But there's no mistaking what happened. Many of the Senate bill’s co-sponsors have since come out against it, leaving Reid a no-win choice: Go forward with the cloture vote he'd planned for Tuesday and lose, or send the bill off into back-burner purgatory.

PIPA sponsor Patrick Leahy got the message — and he wasn’t happy about it.

In a steaming response to Reid's announcement, the Vermont Democrat said Internet thieves in China and Russia "are smugly watching how the United States Senate decided it was not even worth debating how to stop the overseas criminals from draining our economy.”

And he didn’t stop there. Leahy said “the day will come when the senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem.”

The double-barrel decisions to punt on the bill capped an extraordinary week of public pressure — and an extraordinary reversal of fortunes for Hollywood, whose lobbyists seemed to think they were on cruise control to passage of bills aimed at protecting their content from online thieves.

Over the weekend, the White House expressed concerns about the legislation. Over the next several days, co-sponsor after co-sponsor jumped ship. And Thursday night, the four remaining GOP presidential candidates all said they’d oppose the bills as currently drafted. Read more »

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Read more at politico.com

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