SOPA and PIPA Bills Shelved For Now

It looks like Congress may have actually listened to their constituents for a change as both SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) have been shelved for the time being. The Congressional vote on PIPA has been delayed for an undetermined amount of time. The vote was originally suppose to take place on January 24th (Tuesday). Senator Harry Reid:

"In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday's vote on the PROTECT IP Act,"

As for SOPA, it too has been postponed until a later date; here is the official statement from Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith(R-Texas):

€œI have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy. It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products."

So as of right now, neither bill is officially dead but basically neither bill will pass in their current state. I treat this news with cautious optimism, mostly because these Senators are still very determined to wipe out internet piracy; which is good don't get me wrong. I just have absolutely no confidence that these people know how to go about doing it the right way as both SOPA and PIPA prove. These two bills would have destroyed the way video games are covered; the whole "Let's Play" coverage of video games would have disappeared. If you don't know "Let's Play" is where a video game journalist comments on a game he or she is playing will streaming video of the play-through. I actually enjoy some of these shows because they are useful tools in covering video games I may not have time to play or older game I didn't play. Not to mention posting video game trailers on your website could get your website pulled. Just last month VIACOM forced websites to pull down the trailer for The Last of Us because according to some loophole only Gametrailers.com had the rights to show it. Now if every video game company had that kind of power, it would cripple the video game website industry. With that being said, people need to stay vigilant on the issue, because I can almost guarantee there will be another bill coming along that will try to do the same thing; especially with people like Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) (PIPA sponsor) making statments like this:

"The day will come when the Senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem. Somewhere in China today, in Russia today, and in many other countries that do not respect American intellectual property, criminals who do nothing but peddle in counterfeit products and stolen American content are smugly watching how the United States Senate decided it was not even worth debating how to stop the overseas criminals from draining our economy."