Posted by: Tate Steinlage

After millions of signatures from fellow Americans and several headling websites "blacking out," SOPA/PIPA has officially been pulled from congress. 

House Judicary Committee Chariman and the chief sponsor of the SOPA bill Lamar Smith (Rep.Texas) told reporters Friday that he is pulling the bill “until there is wider agreement on the solution." 

Both SOPA and PIPA have been losing their steam in the House of Representatives this past week, and with President Obama doubting the "intent" of the bills, Smith had no other choice than to pull them from congress. 

Smith, not willing to accept the death of SOPA, told reporters that he plans to revise the bill and ultimately push it back through congress: 

“We need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products. The problem of online piracy is too big to ignore. American intellectual property industries provide 19 million high-paying jobs and account for more than 60% of U.S. exports. The theft of America’s intellectual property costs the U.S. economy more than $100 billion annually and results in the loss of thousands of American jobs. Congress cannot stand by and do nothing while American innovators and job creators are under attack.

The online theft of American intellectual property is no different than the theft of products from a store. It is illegal and the law should be enforced both in the store and online.

The Committee will continue work with copyright owners, Internet companies, financial institutions to develop proposals that combat online piracy and protect America’s intellectual property. We welcome input from all organizations and individuals who have an honest difference of opinion about how best to address this widespread problem. The Committee remains committed to finding a solution to the problem of online piracy that protects American intellectual property and innovation.”

Piracy is definitely a problem in this country, and is unquestionably wrong, but both SOPA and PIPA gave the goverment control to shut down sites with no direct reasoning. This entire fiasco just goes to show us that peaceful protests can go a long ways, especially when backed up by millions of Americans.

Source: http://www.gamezone.com/news/sopa-officially-pulled-from-congress

:)

It's not pulled. It's simply delayed.
They come back and push it and keep on pushing it until it goes through.
They have unlimited lubrication.

All that'll happen is they go back and rewrite it and slip it though when people are preoccupied with something else.

nothing is every completly dead in congress.

Another mistake of counting pirated materials as "lost sales".
Face it, those sales would have never happened in the first place.

Here's a real story; the 27th admendment to the Constitution was proposed 203 years before it was passed. It looks like Congress will have to be watched from now on.

Yep, while were all up in arms about SOPA and PIPA, this little gem slipped thru and I heard they are gonna vote on it soon. The thing is, it will have similar or maybe even worse effects than SOPA/PIPA and you can't openly defend against it without being called a pedophile. It's genius really.

Well, they are just trying to protect your "children".

Kinda ironic the whole talk of "stealing american intellectual property" after the great patent heist and who knows what else. And again the the fallacy of saying piracy equals to theft. Not only that, it's becoming very hard to start anything innovative or different without breaking someone's stupid patent.

It's kind of uncanny how much the whole situation resembles the contradictions and moral decay that come along every civilization's decline. See you guys in our future chinese-speaking forum. Or german or russian, who knows.

And THIS is the part where the thinking is fundamentally wrong. Piracy is not comparable to theft. It is a completely different concept of crime. An illegal download will be counted as lost sale which is just wrong to assume. I'm betting that at least 50% of all pirates wouldn't have bought the music, the movie or the game if they had no access to illegal copies.

I'm not trying to defend piracy here, it's just that the industry and (sadly even a lot of users by now through the propaganda of the RIAA, MPAA and the likes) have a completely wrong picture of piracy. That it is compared with normal theft shows that.