The special interests behind the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are in full retreat, throwing the bills' most controversial provisions overboard in a desperate attempt to stop the entire bill from sinking. Realizing that proposals to create a DNS-based blacklisting scheme had become politically radioactive, the bills' sponsors—Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), respectively—have pledged to drop these provisions. On Tuesday, even the Motion Picture Association of America declared that DNS filtering was "off the table" for this year's legislation.
So with the DNS-blocking provisions dead, are today's protests much ado about nothing? Not by a long shot. While the DNS language posed the gravest danger to free speech online, the bills are full of provisions that trample free speech, due process, and online innovation.
It's hard to know exactly what will be in the final version of these bills, since they are still due for several rounds of debate and amendment before they could reach President Obama's desk for a signature. But the latest versions of the bill we could get our hands on—the version of PIPA reported out of the Senate Judiciary in May, and Rep. Smith's "manager's amendment" to SOPA from December—show a number of remaining problems, and we've gotten no commitments from the sponsors to address these remaining issues.
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