SOPA 'shelved' until consensus is found

They're certainly trying to get in front of this story before the 18th. I hope none of the sites planning to protest drop those plans.

Politicians and lobbyists know well that the public has a short attention span -- a few weeks of quiet and most of the discussion will have died down. When's the last time you read about protesting the full body scanners and patdowns of children at airports?

Even if these bills are shelved now, they'll be back later this year.

Excerpts from Rupert Murdoch's reaction https://twitter.com/Rupertmurdoch

"So Obama has thrown in his lot withSilicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery."

"Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying."

"Sure misunderstand many things, but not plain stealing. Incidentally google blocks many other undesirable things."

"Seems like universal anger with [POTUS] from all sorts of normal supporters. Maybe backing pirates a rare miscalculation by friend Axelrod."

"Incidentally google blocks many other undesirable things."

That statement really pisses me off. It also really pissed me off when some politician was like "Google has the technology". Presumably both were referring to SafeSearch and related technologies.

These people have no idea what they are talking about. Blocking porn is an entirely different problem than blocking copyright infringement. Identifying an image as nudity is a task that software can do effectively and that can be crowd sourced in a straight forward manner. Anyone could, without consulting any external source, classify pornography.

However, the same is not true for infringement. The same companies who want their content off of YouTube are publishing free content on YouTube. Google has bent over backwards to block as much infringement as they can and to provide copyright holders the tools they need to manage their intellectual property rights. But the fact remains: you must consult an external source to classify infringing video. Furthermore, fair use is has complex and subtle requirements which are impractical to police using software, crowd sourcing, or enforcement staff.

Good. This is an important victory but the people behind SOPA won't go away so easily. I've always viewed SOPA as more of a litmus test to gauge where Americans stood on copyright enforcement. The next bill the industry tries to get passed(and there will be another) will likely be much more subtle than SOPA was. So let's celebrate, but we must remain diligent. This was only the first round.

I like the idea that there should be an active push to reduce the term of copyright. There's certainly a case to be made that it's unreasonably long, and that the length does not benefit the public.

Take the fight to their turf or always be fighting a defensive war.