Wastrels leave Washington without deciding on Online Piracy Act
The House Judiciary Committee considering whether to send the Stop Online Piracy Act to the House floor abruptly adjourned Friday with no new vote date set—a surprise given that the bill looked certain to pass out of committee today.
The committee’s chairman and chief sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), agreed to further explore a controversial provision that lets the Attorney General order changes to core internet infrastructure in order to stop copyright infringement.
Smith said the hearing would resume at the “earliest practical day that Congress is in session.” Hours later, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) tweeted that the committee would resume action Wednesday.
The abrupt halt to Friday’s proceeding, which followed a marathon-long, 11-hour hearing Thursday, was based on a motion from Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). He urged Smith to postpone the session until technical experts could be brought in to testify whether altering the internet’s domain-naming system to fight websites deemed “dedicated” to infringing activity would create security risks.
Just yesterday, Smith said that was not necessary, despite a signed letter by many of the internet’s core engineers saying the bill’s approach was technically flawed.
The legislation mandates that ISPs alter records in the net’s system for looking up website names, known as DNS, so that users couldn’t navigate to the site. Or, if ISPs choose not to introduce false information into DNS at the urging of the Justice Department, they instead would be required to employ some other method, such as deep-packet inspection, to prevent American citizens from visiting infringing sites.