The series of anti-SOPA activism going on today has already claimed an early victory. Marco Rubio, the Florida Senator and Tea Party favorite, dropped his support after being a co-sponsor of the bill. Home to the Disney World and Universal Studios theme parks, Rubio’s Florida may be the most Hollywood-centric state outside California, and Rubio [...]

Wired is censored today. So is TBogg’s mini-site. The Google doodle is blacked out. And part of Daily Kos. And a lead story at The Huffington Post. And even right here. Sites like Wikipedia and Reddit and I Can Haz Cheezburger and Raw Story and Informed Comment and thousands more are completely dark today, not [...]

The biggest Internet presence in the world will have something to add to the growing online protests against anti-piracy legislation, though they won’t go as far as shutting down their operations. Google plans to highlight the issue with an action item on their famously spare homepage. “Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose [...]

As I noted yesterday, organizers of the SOPA strike got a boost when Wikipedia said they would shut down operations tomorrow, in protest of anti-piracy legislation that could constrain their business. In place of normal content, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he would put up phone numbers for members of Congress and try to “melt [...]

Despite the fact that SOPA looks dead in the House, PIPA, the Senate’s version of anti-piracy legislation, hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s true that six Republicans wrote to Harry Reid asking for a postponement of the bill. And Ben Cardin, a Democratic co-sponsor, announced his opposition to PIPA, even though he will remain on as a [...]

In the end, it was not necessarily the White House’s opposition as much as the pressure on House Republicans that has all but doomed anti-piracy legislation for the year. Darrell Issa, who along with Ron Wyden has been out in front of the opposition to SOPA and PIPA, the respective bills on this issue, says [...]

Responding to a petition on their new site “We the People,” White House officials criticized the two anti-piracy bills making its way through respective houses of Congress, warning against passing legislation that would “inhibit innovation” or lad to the “online censorship of lawful activity.” The reaction to SOPA and PIPA, the latter which is scheduled [...]

In what looks like a victory for the grassroots anti-Internet censorship coalition, the sponsors of two bills moving through Congress, PIPA (Protect IP Act) in the Senate and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) in the House, have agreed to remove or water down controversial provisions that would require ISPs to block domain names that engage [...]

This is the first whip count I’ve seen on PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Property Act, scheduled for a cloture vote in the Senate the week of January 23. As you can see, the Senate already has 49 members on the record supporting PIPA, so they need 11 more to break a filibuster. This is subject [...]

The opposition to a pair of Internet censorship bills in Congress has grown over the past week. The Online News Association delivered its opposition to the bills, joining the American Society of Newspaper Editors. As these are rights holders and content creators who would stand to gain from anti-piracy legislation, it’s significant. The State Department, [...]

The Internet censorship bills, SOPA and PIPA, bouncing around Congress don’t really work unless you apply them globally. If other countries do not vigorously protect their entertainment and high-tech industry’s copyrights in the same way as the United States, those industries will lose market share domestically. So the US has taken to pressuring other countries [...]