Censorship

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

Ordinarily, taking your Web site offline or removing its content is pretty high on the list of ways to damage its prominence in Google search results.

But Google has granted a special exemption during the protests today of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Many in the tech realm despise the proposed legislation and are protesting it with blackened, content-free sites.

Pierre Far, a Webmaster trends analyst at Google, offered an assurance that SOPA protests today won't cause problems with Googlebot, the system Google uses to constantly examine the Web's content and structure.

"We realize many Web … 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

Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Judiciary committee, today said he expects the debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act to resume sometime next month.

"To enact legislation that protects consumers, businesses, and jobs from foreign thieves who steal America's intellectual property," Smith said in a statement, "we will continue to bring together industry representatives and [members of Congress] to find ways to combat online piracy."

Smith suggested that further debate in the U.S. House of Representatives over the bill, which is designed to speed up the legal process involved with getting an … Read more

Sen. Patrick Leahy, the sponsor of a controversial Hollywood-backed copyright bill, has bowed to public pressure and will yank the most controversial sections from the legislation.

The Vermont Democrat, a longtime ally of large copyright holders, said today he would delete portions of his Protect IP Act that mandate Domain Name System (DNS) blocking and redirecting.

"I'm going to set aside these domain name provisions," Leahy told Vermont Public Radio. "That we'll hold back on, because I've listened to some of the concerns on those. I think there [are] easy answers to it, but … 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