Voting on the two sets of anti-piracy proposals – PIPA and SOPA – has been postponed indefinitely, the U.S. Congress reports. Last week on January 18, 2012, approximately 10,000 websites shut down as a way of showing their disapproval with these proposals that would limit free speech and allow internet censorship. At least that’s according to these sites, among which include Wikipedia, WordPress and Mozilla.
On the other side of the fence, SOPA and PIPA supporters argue that web creators need better tools that would help fight online piracy and copyright infringement. These proposals don’t come out of nowhere. They have been modified many times to reflect the needs of content creators. Initially, the proposals stated that they would have required the blocking of criminal sites, but have since removed this provision because of web content creators speaking out.
Supporters of PIPA and SOPA say that companies that participated in January 18th’s blackout are not sharing the whole story and are instead skewing the facts, which in turn is misguiding the public. These very sites that online users trust are misleading their users and encouraging them to vote against PIPA and SOPA, inevitably allowing piracy and online copyright infringement to keep occurring.
Of course, opponents fire back and say that these proposals will have many unintended consequences that will limit free speech and the internet as a whole. In fact, the whole framework that has made the internet so successful will be broken.
At this time, these online companies want Congress to take a step back, look at the proposal in depth and not rush through anything. Most importantly, they don’t want to have their websites shut down just because they’re affiliated with a site that is engaged in copyright infringement or piracy.
Voting was supposed to take place this month, but has now been placed on hold. PIPA and SOPA are not dead, but just postponed for now, as Congress works to restructure the proposal.
Image Source: iconarchive.com
