RIP SOPA, PIPA

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid today postponed Tuesday’s vote on the Senate’s version of a controversial Internet piracy bill “in light of recent events.”

Those “recent events” include Wednesday’s protests against the bill by Wikipedia and thousands of other websites, which either blacked out their homepages or included statements attacking the bill. These protests ginned up grassroots opposition to the bill and led many members of Congress who previously supported the legislation to announce they were having second thoughts.

The Protect IP Act and its House counterpart, the Stop Online Piracy Act, were crafted as a way to prevent foreign websites from offering pirated movies or music or counterfeit drugs or other products to U.S. consumers. The bills would require Internet companies to police their websites to make sure that users weren’t posting content that infringed on copyrights.

Internet companies, including Google and Facebook, contended the bill would lead to Internet censorship and stifle Internet innovation by creating new legal liabilities for websites.

Reid said he isn’t giving up hope on getting some sort of legislation passed to address online piracy.

“Counterfeiting and piracy cost the American economy billions of dollars and thousands of jobs each year,” he said.

Reid encouraged Protect IP Act sponsor Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, “to continue engaging with all stakeholders to forge a balance between Americans’ intellectual property and maintaining openness and innovation on the Internet. We’ve made good progress through the discussions we’ve held in recent days, and I am optimistic that we can reach a compromise in the coming weeks.”

Translation: The bill is dead, at least for now.

Meanwhile, the House sponsor of the Stop Online Piracy Act announced that his committee won’t mark up the bill until “there is wider agreement on a solution.”

Meanwhile Representative Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, said he has listened to SOPA’s critics “and I take seriously their concerns.”

“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,” Smith said.

Meanwhile, all four Republican presidential candidates spoke out against the bill during last night’s debate in South Carolina. Mitt Romney said the legislation is “far too expansive.” Newt Gingrich said the bill would “totally mess up the Internet.” Ron Paul has been against it all along. Rick Santorum said the bill “goes too far,” but he did say something needs to be done about online piracy.

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Kent Hoover is the Washington bureau chief for bizjournals.