Seems the protest may have been successful, with 18 senators changing their votes. It's still not a sure bet to fail, but at the moment, if it passes it will do so with a small enough majority that it at least has the possibility of a presidential veto.
This is good news, but alas not yet good enough. What I'm particularly worried about is the fickle nature of the internet; now the Blackout is over, the vast majority of people just don't care anymore, and have turned instead to making jokes about a certain musician's debut on Twitter.
SOPA needs to be stopped dead. In its current form it's never going to be modified enough to make it acceptable to those of us who deem it a real threat. PIPA is even worse, and represents the aspect of SOPA with real technological concerns.
Whilst I totally agree that piracy needs to be fought, this is not the way to do it. The only correct stance to take is to be completely against SOPA/PIPA, and hope that they are shot down without chance of revival.
It occurs to me that Hollywood is behind this push, and that Movie piracy is really the main issue. It's clear that phrases such as "protect american jobs from foreign criminals" are coming direct from the mouths of the MPAA, who care more about protecting their own wallets than anything else, and not from any governmental body which is generally concerned about a loss of American jobs to movie piracy ( there isn't one, it's utter horse shit and America has far bigger problems than Piracy to say the very least ).
However, these acts seek to place the responsibility of stopping piracy on
everyone. Not just every American, but everyone in any country which is even slightly friendly towards the US of A. Note: that doesn't include any of these "Foreign Criminals" who will, by and large, tell the MPAA to shove a cactus up their collective ass and will continue to operate as normal.
We shouldn't be burdened with this responsibility, or the legal repercussions that come with not effectively upholding it to whatever arbitrary level is decided at the time.
What's happening is that technology is making movie piracy easier, and rather than attempting to set up sane distribution channels, and push new movie releases to services like Netflix ( I subscribe to both Netflix AND Lovefilm at the moment, but they're just not good enough in the UK ) the movie industry is still expecting to tie viewers into the box office and disgustingly overpriced DVD/Blu-Ray sales.
American jobs are at risk not from foreign criminals, but a change in consumer demand. That's par for the course in any industry, and using the government to pass despicable, over-broad acts which burden those same consumers with the responsibility of policing the entire internet is the wrong way to go about things.
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