Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Lamar Smith (R- TX) announced that the provision requiring ISPs to block access to overseas Web sites accused of piracy has been yanked from SOPA.
This is a major victory for the tech sector since this provision required changes to the Domain Name System (DNS) blocking provision which would have destabilized the web.
"After consultation with industry groups across the country," Smith said in a statement released by his office. "I feel we should remove (DNS) blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the [U.S. House Judiciary] Committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision… We will continue to look for ways," Smith continued, "to ensure that foreign Web sites cannot sell and distribute illegal content to U.S. consumers."
This happened because the backers of PIPA reversed their position on the DNS provision in the proposed bill. This reversal came from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) (chief sponsor of PIPA) which is basically a bill heavily supported by the music and film industries, but both left an ‘out’ in which they stated the DNS provision (which turned the ISP’s into ‘enforcers’) might be reinstated in a modified or different form later. PIPA was blocked from going to the Senate for a vote by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) who also held up COICA last year which caused PIPA to come about.
What they aren’t talking about is whether they would also remove the provision that required an ISP to employ other censoring methods. The proposed bill still requires search engines to remove the suspected pirate sites from their searches and credit card companies and on-line ad services from partnering with them by allowing “rights holders” to seek injunctions to enforce that. In DMCA, “rights holders” already have the ability to demand search engines to stop displaying search results linking to infringing sites. Only the government gets the DNS-blocking powers.
The Government has been invoking asset-forfeiture law to seize generic top level domains of infringing sites (and only after warrants are ordered by a court) in “Operation in Our Sites” in which DHS targeted 128 sites.
The tech sector essentially was unified in its opposition to the DNS provision of SOPA… except for GoDaddy which felt the consumer displeasure for its stand.
The fight is far from over.
Sources:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/blacklisting-law-advances/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/dns-sopa-provision/
http://www.zdnet.com/news/dns-provision-pulled-from-sopa-victory-for-opponents/6339421