House Republicans Clash on SOPA at CES Debate

"There is a great deal of talk,” Blackburn said in an interview. “What people want us to make certain we do is, number one, do no harm. Number two, have a very clearly defined process in that individuals can seek justice. They want us to make certain that this is limited to foreign, rogue sites.” Blackburn said something will move forward in the House this year. “I've got meetings back in Tennessee tomorrow on the issue,” she said.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said in response that SOPA is “ill-conceived, written in Hollywood” and includes “all kinds of things that physically can’t be done including DNS blocking.” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, and Ranking Member John Conyers, D-Mich., “should be ashamed for the way they've prepared this bill,” Issa said. “They held one hearing, in preparation for a markup, in which they ordered Google … to show up to be humiliated.” Nothing could save SOPA, he said. “The bottom line is you've got to throw it away.” Issa has introduced alternative legislation, the OPEN Act, which would authorize the U.S. International Trade Commission to hear cases against foreign infringing sites.

Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., told us SOPA “is flawed” and can’t go forward until a manager’s amendment is written. Many Republicans, like Blackburn, are sensitive to the concerns of the content community, he said. SOPA is more likely to move at this late date than Issa’s bill, Stearns said: “The best strategy is to go ahead and get this bill amended and fixed and then try to get it to the floor.” Stearns said House leadership has to recognize that the bill can’t be approved until changes are made.

The outlook for legislation remains unclear at this point, former Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., said in an interview. “There is a real problem,” he said. “It needs to be addressed. The question is how do you do it without impairing the functioning of the Internet. That’s the question.”

"Both in the House and the Senate, the legislation sponsored by the respective committee chairs has a lot of momentum,” Boucher said. The Senate is expected to take up the PROTECT IP Act as soon as it returns from its break Jan. 24, he noted. The next step in the Senate is a cloture vote to bring the bill to the floor. “That process can take a long time,” he said. “Debate can last for about two weeks, just on the cloture motion itself. I think it remains to be seen whether the Senate has the patience to take two weeks on this measure and time will tell."

The House Judiciary Committee still has a lot of work to do on SOPA, with numerous amendments that must be addressed, Boucher said. “There probably are the votes to pass the bill in the House [Judiciary] Committee. Whether the votes exist on the floor is another matter. My sense is the longer it takes in committee to carry on this debate, the greater the opposition."

Ryan Clough, aide to Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., and Jayme White, aide to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., both said during a CES panel Tuesday that the House and Senate bills could both sink under their own weight. SOPA “isn’t limited to copyright and trademark,” Clough said. “It’s going to set and create a long-term architecture for censorship on the Internet. … There’s no way that once we create this sort of system that it’s simply going to be contained to copyright and trademark enforcement.” White said there has yet to even be a hearing on PROTECT IP and predicted that a number of senators, including his boss, will do what they can to see that the measure is defeated.

"I am satisfied with the way things have been moving,” said Sandra Aistars, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, which supports the legislation. “I think it’s very important that the House spends a lot of time drafting the manager’s amendment to try to address the concerns that people have raised. I really hope that people focus on those changes and understand them as the debate on the bill moves forward.” PROTECT IP has more than 40 cosponsors, “which is enormous for any piece of legislation moving through the Senate,” she said. SOPA hasn’t been around as long, but support is growing, she said.

Aistars said the rhetoric on the legislation has been heated. She cited remarks by CEA President Gary Shapiro. “Gary called everybody who supports the bill a copyright extremist and that’s the first time in my life that I've been called a copyright extremist,” she said. “I think there’s a lot of mudslinging around the bills and a lot of hyperbole to rile people up.”