Is Washington Having Second Thoughts on SOPA?

Wikipedia was the largest site to go dark in protest of SOPA on January 18, 2012.

Image: Reuters/Yves Herman

There’s no grassroots like the "netroots."

That’s the lesson Hollywood, the music industry, Big Pharma, and their supporters on Capitol Hill are learning today as a result of thousands of websites—the biggest among them Wikipedia and Reddit—going dark for 24 hours to protest pending legislation designed to crack down on online piracy. Other sites stayed up, but posted messages opposing the bill on their homepages. Google, for example, placed a black box over its logo, with a message: “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the Web!”

At issue is the Stop Online Piracy Act and a companion bill pending in the Senate. The intent of the legislation is to create new weapons to prevent foreign websites from selling pirated movies and music or counterfeit drugs. This theft of intellectual property is costing U.S. companies billions of dollars.

The legislation would require Internet companies to police their sites to look for rogue users. Copyright holders, such as movie studios, could go to court and require search engines to remove links to sites that include unauthorized content. In its original form, the bill would require Internet service providers to block the IP addresses of infringing sites.

Internet companies contend the bill would lead to Internet censorship and stifle innovation by creating new legal liabilities. They’re countering the lobbying might of Hollywood by mobilizing the millions of Internet users to speak out against the bill. Today’s website blackouts mark the high point of this effort.

“Keep your hands off the Internet” has been a successful lobbying strategy in the past. It’s been the rallying cry for opponents of imposing sales taxes on online purchases for more than a decade. Internet service providers have used a similar battle cry—“don’t regulate the Internet”—in their efforts to stop net neutrality legislation or regulations, which would force them to treat all Web traffic the same.

Now it looks like this strategy will at least force changes to, if not defeat, the online piracy bills pending in Congress. Some previous supporters of the legislation, such as Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, now say they’re against it. Bill sponsors already have agreed to drop the provision that would require ISPs to prevent users from accessing sites that feature content that infringes on copyrights.

Despite the campaign against it, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he will bring up the Senate’s version of the bill for a procedural vote on Tuesday. We’ll see. The Nevada Democrat will back down if he doesn’t have the votes. By next week, he may not have them.

In the House, Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith said his panel will resume marking up the bill in February. Smith, a Texas Republican, dismissed today’s website blackouts as a “publicity stunt.”

But Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican, said “this unprecedented effort has turned the tide against a backroom lobbying effort by interests that aren’t used to being told ‘no.’” Issa supports an alternative approach to dealing with foreign rogue websites—have the U.S. International Trade Commission handle complaints about them. The ITC already handles complaints about imports that violate patents held by U.S. companies.

This bill could gain momentum in the coming weeks because it offers a way to provide copyright owners with additional protection against foreign infringers without upsetting the Internet ecosystem.