If you haven’t heard, Congress is trying to pass a bill that would threaten freedom of expression on the internet. Your favorite sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and even Unheard Voices could be effected by this bill. Today, President Obama announced “we would not” support the controversial SOPA act.
*Correction, President Obama cannot stop the bill as we reported from a Forbes article. Forbes has followed up with this message:
This isn’t quite right on several levels. The bills wouldn’t give copyright holders the capacity to sue – this is already the law of the land, for one thing. It would give content owners the ability to actually shut down websites that they believe violate their copyright.
The more troubling error in John’s statement, however, is that Obama’s statement “killed SOPA.” This is simply not the case, even if it is some nice wishful thinking.
SOPA is very much alive, though it has been drastically slowed down. Minority Whip, Eric Cantor, has assured SOPA-opponent Rep. Darrell Issa that the bill won’t move forward without consensus. Whatever that means, it surely does not mean that SOPA is dead.
President Barack Obama has said that we would not support the controversial SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) that would allow the justice department to force search engines from linking to sites that were accused of copyright infringement and require Internet providers to block those sites as well.
The bill was sponsored by the The Motion Picture Association of America due to the large amount of movies that have been pirated on the Internet.
The growing anti-SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) support that has swept through the gaming and Internet community found a very big ally today. With websites like Reddit and Wikipedia and gaming organizations like Major League Gaming prepared for a blackout on January 18th – the same day that the House Judiciary Committee hearing on HR 3261was scheduled in Washington, DC – President Barack Obama has stepped in and said he would not support the bill.
SOPA has been delayed, for now. The House has agreed to revisit the issue next month, but they now know the White House will veto any bill that’s not more narrowly focused.
— Forbes
