SOPA Stalling As Opposition Grows

Two controversial anti-piracy bills, SOPA in the House and PIPA in the Senate, face mounting criticism for going too far to block pirated content.

Is Congress giving up on forcibly blocking foreign, rogue websites as an anti-piracy technique?

Two anti-piracy bills -- the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (Protect IP) in the Senate -- have proposed protecting copyrighted content, including movies and music, by redirecting people away from rogue websites. The legislation would empower authorities to get a court order requiring U.S. service providers to block the domain name system (DNS) entries for any foreign website that was deemed to be hosting pirated content.

But opposition to the bills continues to mount. Numerous websites, including Wikipedia, plan to "go dark" this Wednesday to protest the SOPA legislation. Meanwhile, an anti-SOPA petition hosted on whitehouse.gov garnered 50,000 signatures.

In response, the White House Saturday weighed in on the two proposed bills, saying the administration wouldn't support any legislation that messed with DNS, for starters. ...

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