Opponents of a congressional effort to curb Internet piracy gained their biggest ally yet as the search-engine company Google today joined a protest of the legislation planned by dozens of websites, many of which will shut down today.Although Google’s protest isn’t as dramatic as that of the other websites, it posted a link on its home page today stating its opposition to the House of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy Act and a companion Senate bill, the Protect IP Act.Wikipedia, the user-generated encyclopedia, shut down for 24 hours starting at midnight. Other sites will go dark for part of the day, including the social-media news site Reddit and blog-hosting site WordPress; the latter posted a censorship protest at midnight.
The anti-piracy bills have supporters and opponents in both parties. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee had called cybersecurity experts and Internet entrepreneurs to testify in a hearing today, but the panel’s chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., postponed the hearing after he felt satisfied that lawmakers had begun to listen to the legislation’s opponents.“The voice of the Internet community has been heard,” Issa said in a statement. “Much more education for members of Congress about the workings of the Internet is essential if anti-piracy legislation is to be workable and achieve broad appeal.”
The battle pits traditional media companies — movie and film studios, book publishers and television networks — against technology and Internet businesses. The former group supports the Stop Online Piracy Act because the bill tries to address the growing problem of foreign websites posting copyrighted content without permission.Technology companies say the bill would restrict the free flow of information on the Internet and stifle innovation that gave rise to sites such as YouTube and Facebook.
Faced with an online petition calling for President Barack Obama to veto the legislation, the White House weighed in over the weekend. Three administration officials involved in technology policy wrote in a memo that they oppose any effort to censor the Internet or compromise cybersecurity. However, they stopped short of opposing the bills specifically.As originally written, the Stop Online Piracy Act would have let the Justice Department order search engines to disable links to foreign sites with pirated content, making them inaccessible in the U.S.
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