http://mashable.com/2012/01/20/sopa-is-dead-smith-pulls-bill/ Lamar Smith, the chief sponsor of SOPA, said on Friday that he is pulling the bill “until there is wider agreement on a solution.” “I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy,” Smith (R-Texas) said. “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.”
I hope people will still be watching that bill and make sure it won't get signed into law. US (and world!) economy might make a big nosedive if the US Internet turns into a clone of the Great Firewall of China. We'd probably see companies going out of business in droves, including the ones who were the most vocal advocates for that bill. There's another danger on the horizon that is part of the SOPA initiative: Windows 8 with its UEFI secure boot, which effectively locks out alternative operating systems like Linux. It might become difficult to obtain hardware w/o UEFI in some years. Then we'll be back to the walled gardens of the 1980ies ... thanks to Apple and Microsoft. Both companies have been trying for years to allow only signed software on their operating systems ... if there's a hardware mechanism to lock out independent software (and documents, even!), people will have a hard time publishing their independent works. The SOPA initiative for the Internet would have even broader consequences, namely locking down large parts of the Internet to proprietary realms. The movie and music industry would be pleased of course, but as soon as consumption would reach saturated levels, those companies would begin to go out of business. The only solution would be to stay clear of UEFI or TPM enabled hardware (if that isn't outlawed one day). If all else fails, there's still the option to create an independent subnet in the US that interfaces to the real Internet ... like some people in China or Iran are doing. But it doesn't have to get that far.
Furthermore, SOPA and PIPA are deeply unnecessary, b/c copyright legislation already exists and is enforced. There are plenty of law firms thriving on that. File sharing is already monitored at a large scale, and it is actually pretty easy to catch every single file sharer there is that is sharing files illegally. I've actually been working in that field for one and a half years, so I know what's possible. So those proposed laws are pots with handles inside ... they're not necessary and make things worse for everybody, further contributing to the destruction of the free Internet.
