SOPA and PIPA go cold, Megaupload.com owners busted

The battle is over, but the war may have just begun.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), author and co-sponsor of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), announced Friday that he would postpone the bill from floor consideration in the House. Smith told Reuters in a telephone interview that he would wait to give the bill more floor time until there is "a wider agreement on a solution." Senate Majority leader Harry Reid also called off a vote on the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property (PROTECT IP) Act, or PIPA, which is essentially the Senate version of the bill.

Both bills have generated a ferocious backlash from various Internet communities. On Wednesday, more than 40,000 websites completely blacked out and 30,000 more participated in the protest by altering their homepages in some way, according to Forbes.

Despite the bills' simultaneous defeat in Congress on Friday, New Zealand police were still able to arrest Kim Dotcom, aka Kim Schmitz, suspected mastermind behind the file-sharing site Megaupload.com. Dotcom barricaded himself in his reportedly NZ$30 million ($24 million U.S.) house behind a maze of electronic locks and security systems, eventually locking himself in a safe room according to the Huffington Post. Officers had to break the locks and cut their way through the safe door to reach Dotcom.

You might be asking yourself, What's so bad about wanting to stop online piracy? Aren't people like Dotcom ripping off copyright holders for millions?

While most people don't condone illegal activity, critics like Andrew McDiarmid of the Center for Democracy and Technology warn of potential threats to a free Internet. In an opinion piece he wrote for CNN, McDiarmid said that the bills could "do more harm than good" and possibly "infringe upon First Amendment Rights." If these bills were to pass, anyone who posts or streams copyrighted material could face up to five years in prison. Not only are you liable, but the website that hosts the content could be shutdown via court order by Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

Let's put it another way. Say you make a video of yourself singing a Beatles song and post it to YouTube. Technically, since the song is copyrighted, the courts could legally shut down YouTube and send you to prison.

Wait, what?

Yes, that's right. Rep. Smith's bill just took a bold step into a fierce battleground of convoluted legal action.

But it seems that the Internet would have the last laugh.

Jamie Lee Curtis Taete of Vice.com exposed an embarrassing error on Smith's campaign website: even he was a violator under the SOPA provisions.

The background image he used on his website was not properly attributed to the photographer who took it, a man named DJ Schulte. Taete tracked Schulte down and asked if anyone from Smith's office received permission to use his picture. Schulte's answer is both revealing and brilliant:

"I do not see anywhere on the screen capture that you have provided [of Smith's website] that the image was attributed to the source (me). So my conclusion would be that Lamar Smith's organization did improperly use my image. So according to the SOPA bill, should it pass, maybe I could petition the court to take action against www.texansforlamarsmith.com."

According to Whitehouse.gov, the Obama administration "will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet." Critics from Wikipedia to Twitter have accused SOPA and PIPA of doing exactly that.

Senior Jimmy Edwards agrees that this legislation would have a negative impact. "These bills would change the landscape of Internet freedom in this country for the worse."

A Forbes articles framed the consequences of these bills from another perspective – SOPA and PIPA would turn Justin Bieber from a pop star into a convicted criminal. "If this law was enacted years ago, a guy like Justin Bieber would go to a federal prison for five years because he was singing unauthorized versions of Michael Jackson songs posted on websites around the world," says Andrew Bridges, a lawyer at Fenwick and West in San Francisco.