Illustrating the very real power regular people have...

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Lawmakers Begin SOPA Retreat, Positive Signs For Free Speech Online
By E.D. Kain

Concerns over anti-piracy bills in congress are finally beginning to influence lawmakers. SOPA [Stop Online Piracy Act] architect Lamar Smith is, apparently, listening – especially now that the Obama administration is voicing its own concerns over the legislation.

In a statement, Smith said he will remove controversial DNS-blocking rules from the bill, though his counterpart in the Senate, Patrick Leahy, has only mentioned changing those rules.

“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.”

Cory Doctorow, writing at BoingBoing, points out that “Even without its DNS provisions, SOPA remains terminally flawed, creating a regime that would be terminally hostile to any site that contains links and any site that allows the public to post comments on it.”

Andy Greenberg also reports that Rep. Darrell Issa, an opponent of the bills, is delaying a hearing on the matter in light of the new concessions. The hearing would “have included Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, domain name system researcher Dan Kaminsky, and other outspoken opponents of the bill from the tech industry,” according to Greenberg.

I’m a little nervous about the whole thing, honestly.

While this is good news for free speech advocates and the tech industry, the risk as it stands now is that minor concessions are made and then still very deeply flawed legislation pushes its way through congress. The Obama administration, meanwhile, has made positive noises about the bills but can’t be fully trusted to stand behind its statements.

Either way, at least we finally have a real debate on the issue and, for now at least, momentum has slowed, prompting Matt Yglesias to write:

“It increasingly looks like the SOPA/Protect IP fights are turning into an example of how the political system sometimes does work correctly after all. The con forces on these bills initially looked numerically overwhelmed in congress and hugely outspent. But opponents really mobilized vocally, got people and institutions who don’t normally focus on politics to write about this, and perhaps most important of all demonstrated that more people genuinely cared about this issue than most members of congress initially realized. Now the momentum has slowed incredibly and the White House technology policy team has come out against these bills.

To look a gift horse in the mouth for a second, however, I note that the White House statement does contain a “reasonable” to-be-sure line stating that “online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, and threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs.”

I’m not sure this is our political system “working” so much as it illustrates the very real power regular people have, using technology to work together to raise awareness. The political system “working” too often means bipartisan efforts to do very bad things.
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