The senate counterpart to the House’s SOPA, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), is quickly losing support and today saw several co-sponsors of the bill abandoning ship.
Senator Marco Rubio has had a change of conscience. The legislation abomination known as PIPA, birthed in part from Rubio’s Floridian law-womb, just officially lost his support. Keep up the pressure, everyone.
Citing “legitimate concerns about the impact the bill could have on access to the Internet and about a potentially unreasonable expansion of the federal government’s power to impact the Internet,” Rubio says “I have decided to withdraw my support for the Protect IP Act. Furthermore, I encourage Senator Reid to abandon his plan to rush the bill to the floor.”
Talking Points Memo has more.
Meanwhile, Reps. Ben Quayle (R-AZ) and Lee Terry (R-NE), two co-sponsors of SOPA, are both quietly removing their names from the official list of co-sponsors, POLITICO reported on Wednesday morning.
The news of the defections came on the same day that up to 7,000 U.S. websites — including Google, Wikipedia and Craigslist — blacked out parts or all of their homepages in protest of the bills, a protest started by Reddit.
Senator Reid is by no means “rushing the bill” to the floor, because if he were it would have been voted on before the holiday recess. With that said, it’s looking increasingly likely that Harry Reid will either cancel the vote or bring it to a vote just to have everyone on record voting for or against it.
I don’t feel confident saying PIPA is dead yet, but a diagnosis is imminent.
