Sen. Leahy bows to pressure, pledges to amend Protect IP bill

Declan McCullagh

CNet
January 13, 2012

Sen. Patrick Leahy, the sponsor of a controversial Hollywood-backed copyright bill, has bowed to public pressure and will yank the most controversial sections from the legislation.

The Vermont Democrat, a longtime ally of large copyright holders, said today he would delete portions of his Protect IP Act that mandate Domain Name System (DNS) blocking and redirecting.

“I’m going to set aside these domain name provisions,” Leahy told Vermont Public Radio. “That we’ll hold back on, because I’ve listened to some of the concerns on those. I think there [are] easy answers to it, but let’s set it aside, let’s spend a year or so studying that part.” (See CNET’s FAQ.)

Leahy’s volte face has thrown an unexpected obstacle in front of the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America–which have lobbied for a bill to censor “rogue” offshore Web sites–just a few days before the Senate debate on the bill begins on January 24. A Web blackout day to protest SOPA and PIPA is planned for January 18 by sites including Reddit and perhaps even Wikipedia.

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Comment by MrEthiopian on January 14, 2012 at 4:22am: apparently Sen Patrick Leahy has been bought off with a multi million dollar payoff to his super PAC, now that its legal to take bribes and by the way what happens to the money in the PAC when that politician leaves office??? You got its their money to do what ever they want, America sold to the highest bidder. Why is it a senator is takeing upon him self to police freedom of speech of the entire internet, will Patrick be deciding what American can see and read, what next is he going to tell us what we can think about?

The MPAA has been fighiting this battle for the last six or so years, now that citizens united was illegally passed , our senators are strangely taking on the plight that was a private corporations problem, why is that Leahy is now standing up and fighting for the MPAA, was he so gung-ho prior to citizens united? I don't think so , because their was no personal financial windfal.

Sen Patrick Leahy sold out America and should be in jail for the rest of his life!!!

Comment by cristian david on January 13, 2012 at 10:44am: no, no, no, no, that's not good! no bill should be passed about the internet! internet is fine the way it is! if Hollywood is worried about their movies, just distribute them in movie theaters until they recover the investment - this will help the market stay competitive, too! if the movie is bad, post it online, for free! probably no one will watch it anyway.

Comment by TheLasersShadow on January 13, 2012 at 10:31am: They still want to just get something passed to get their foot in further in the door. Don't know if they still want people to go to jail for singing a song on youtube?

I think the Senator realized that he looked like a fool trying to block at the DNS level and is going back to the drawing board to come up with something much more draconian like putting fire walls on all lines coming into the USA as well as firewalls on all ISP's to block VPN, Proxy's and offending IP's. Still wouldn't work as there is 'I2P' a program that changes IP's to encryption hashes, encrypts all traffic and allows anonymous webservers. I tried it one about a year ago, it was very slow but worked. I'm sure if things get bad here that programs like that will be the only way to bypass. ALSO a hail Mary idea...

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