The Eight Biggest Media Moments of 2012 – #7: The death of SOPA

Congress kicked off 2012 with a couple of eerie efforts to smother free speech on the Internet. The version in the House was called the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the Senate’s was the Protect Intellectual Property Act. Of course the two versions differed in some details, but the main idea was the same: extend copyright “protection” well beyond the already-generous boundaries established by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (a.k.a. The Mickey Mouse Protection Act) more than a decade ago.

The Mickey Mouse law was bad enough, but this pair were plain crazy. They would have introduced the principle of “guilty by accusation,” allowing big media companies to run crying to the federal government and get entire sites shut down based on a simple claim of copyright violation. The edges of the law’s protection are fuzzy enough – particularly in the realm of the fair use exception – to require proper adjudication, not censorship based on mere suspicion.

But more interesting than the proposals themselves was the reaction to them. Big Media (with Disney and Time Warner in the lead) lobbied hard, but they found themselves up against Big Internet (particularly Google). And worse, they faced a sudden groundswell of grassroots opposition from Internet users. After a 24-hour protest that blacked out Wikipedia and several other popular sites, legislators turned tail and removed the bills from consideration.

That alone made it a big moment. How often do you see Congress pay attention to anyone other than lobbyists?