Politics

All four Republican presidential candidates today denounced a pair of controversial Hollywood-backed copyright bills, lending a sharp partisan edge to yesterday's protest against the legislation by Wikipedia, Google, and thousands of other Web sites.

The bills are "far too intrusive, far too expensive, far too threatening (to) the freedom of speech and movement of information across the Internet," former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney said during tonight's CNN debate in South Carolina.

Romney's rivals offered similar criticisms of the Senate measure, Protect IP--scheduled for a floor vote next week--and the House bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act, … Read more

A widespread Internet protest against Hollywood-backed copyright legislation has knocked some U.S. Senate Web sites intermittently offline.

Around 11 a.m. PT today, the rush of visitors looking for ways to contact their members of Congress overwhelmed several Web pages of individual senators. As CNET reported this morning, some sponsors of the Protect IP and the Stop Online Piracy Act have switched sides as a result of the protest.

The amount of traffic "temporarily shut down our Web site," Sen. Ron Wyden, the leading opponent of the Protect IP Act, wrote on Twitter.

By noon PT, the … Read more

An unprecedented online protest against a Hollywood-backed copyright bill may be working: some of its previous supporters in the U.S. Congress are backing down.

The protest, which included a Wikipedia blackout and home page alerts at Google.com and Amazon.com, has prompted some senators contacted by CNET today to abandon their earlier enthusiasm for Protect IP and the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. A Senate floor vote on Protect IP is scheduled for January 24.

"I'm withdrawing my co-sponsorship for the Protect IP Act," said Sen. Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican.

Sen. John Boozman, … Read more

When Rep. Lamar Smith announced the Stop Online Piracy Act in late October, he knew it was going to be controversial.

But the Texas Republican probably never anticipated the broad and fierce outcry from Internet users that SOPA provoked over the last few months. It was a show of public opposition to Internet-related legislation not seen since the 2003 political wrangling over implanting copy-protection technology in PCs, or perhaps even the blue ribbons appearing on Web sites in the mid-1990s in response to the Communications Decency Act.

Consider the concerted protest on January 18 by high-profile Web companies and organizations. … Read more

Three of the Internet's most popular destinations--Google, Wikipedia, and Craigslist--launched an audacious experiment in political activism this evening by urging their users to protest a pair of Hollywood-backed copyright laws.

Wikipedia's English-language pages went completely black at 9 p.m. PT, with a splash page saying "the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet." The online encyclopedia's blackout, intended to precede next week's Senate floor vote on the legislation, is scheduled to last 24 hours.

Craigslist and Google have taken a more modest approach. Unlike Wikipedia, … Read more

Congressional foes of Hollywood-backed copyright legislation came to the Consumer Electronics Show today to warn technology companies that there's not much time left to derail the controversial proposals.

The remarks from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) were meant to deliver a blunt warning: if you were intending to do anything about proposals to levy the equivalent of a death penalty on allegedly piratical Web sites, now's the time.

"This is a crucial window here for those who want to see the Net come out of this debate without this enormous collateral damage" … Read more

An e-voting machine that is to be used for the presidential election this year has been found to have "anomalies" such as failing to record votes or logging the wrong vote and freezing, according to a government report.

The Formal Investigative Report issued late last month by the Electronic Assistance Commission (EAC), which certifies electronic voting equipment, issued a notice of noncompliance for the DS200 optical scanning device manufactured by Electronic Systems & Software (ES&S), but did not decertify the machine.

The report found three anomalies:

Former presidential candidate Al Gore has joined conservatives at the Heritage Foundation and Americans for Tax Reform in expressing reservations about controversial Hollywood-backed copyright legislation.

Gore actually went a bit further than the Republican-affiliated groups: in a now-deleted YouTube video of a speech at a CareerBuilder event, the ex-veep warned that proposals to levy an Internet death penalty against allegedly piratical Web sites "would very probably have the effect of really shutting down the vibrancy of the Internet." (See CNET's FAQ on SOPA.)

It wasn't clear whether Gore was talking about the House of Representatives bill … Read more

Rep. Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Judiciary committee, proudly announced last month that Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform had endorsed his controversial Stop Online Piracy Act.

Smith, a close ally of Hollywood on copyright law, cited ATR by name when saying that his bill enjoys "broad support across the aisle here in the House, across the street in the Senate and across the country." SOPA and a similar bill in the Senate called Protect IP would levy an Internet death penalty against allegedly piratical Web sites.

In the last few weeks, though, the famously combative … Read more