A bill that critics say would have given the government power to censor the Internet will not pass this year thanks to the Oregon Democrat, who announced his opposition during a recent committee hearing. Individual Senators can place holds on pending legislation, in this case meaning proponents of the bill will be forced to reintroduce the measure and will not be able to proceed until the next Congress convenes.

Proponents Of The Bill Include Communist Sleeper Cells such as Patrick Leahy and Cho Cho Rockefeller!

 

Senator Leahy (D) Tells Soldiers ” No Funding Unless You Protect Sodomites”

 

John Jay Rockefeller – D WV – Was just recently bribed: $21,250 – to vote for S.510 The Queen’s Food Austerity Act.

Communist Jay Rockefeller Wishes FCC Would Shut Down Fox News …

Opponents of the bill insist that many sites which contain allegedly infringing materials also traffic in legitimate data that’s constitutionally protected. There’s also a fear that whatever action the US takes, other countries will seek to emulate, and some to a much more zealous degree.

Activist group DemandProgress, which is running a petition against the bill, argued the powers in the bill could be used for political purposes. If the whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks is found to be hosting copyrighted material, for instance, access to WikiLeaks could be blocked for all US Internet users, they suggested.

A group of academics, led by Temple University law professor David Post, have signed a petition opposing COICA.

“The Act, if enacted into law, would fundamentally alter U.S. policy towards Internet speech, and would set a dangerous precedent with potentially serious consequences for free expression and global Internet freedom,” Post wrote in the petition letter (PDF).

“Blacklisting entire sites out of the domain name system,” explained the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF), a privacy and digital rights advocate group, is a “reckless scheme that will undermine global Internet infrastructure and censor legitimate online speech.”

The EFF has published a list of Web sites it believes are at highest risk of being shut down under the proposed law. Included in the list are file-hosting services such as Rapidshare and Mediafire, music mash-up sites like SoundCloud and MashupTown, as well as “sites that discuss and advocate for P2P technology or for piracy,” such as pirate-party.us and P2PNet.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, often cited as the father of the world wide web, has called Internet disconnection laws in the name of copyright protection a “blight” on the net.