 There are two bills currently being considered by Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect Act P Act in the Senate. These bills were intended to address online copyright infringement, but rather than narrowly targeting large-scale commercial infringement, these bills are overly broad and would have far-reaching consequences for the websites and services people use every day. Under an existing copyright law, websites have what is known as safe harbor, so something you might use every day such as Twitter, Facebook or where you host your blog is not responsible for the content you upload. This gives you the space to have free expression to discuss what you want without fear that the website operator is going to monitor, going to censor or somehow limit what you would like to say. However, under the provisions of the Protect Act P Act and under SOPA, this safe harbor could have been undermined, where copyright holders could go directly to payment processors and pressure those services to stop providing financial services to a website if they thought that website was hosting pirated material. What's been amazing about the internet has been development of online communities, places where people have blogs like Tumblr, like Blogger and social networks where users feel free to discuss what's on their minds, share political thoughts and build their social relationships. However, some of the concerns that were raised under the SOPA and the Protect Act P Act has been that these websites could be shut down or could be limited because of the actions of a few users. If some users were found to be sharing pirated content, there would be fears that copyright holders might pressure the attorney general, might pressure the courts, might pressure private financial services to stop providing the lifeblood of these websites. It was incredible this week, simply a sheer number of users that spoke out concerned about how these bills would impact their daily lives online. We had 10,000 websites that were blacked out or had notices on their websites concerned about the bill. Google had 7.5 million people sign a petition. I think the numbers I saw were around 192 million page views for information about the Stop Online Piracy Act, about the Protect IP Act and the concerns it would raise for the internet community. It's amazing simply the diversity of users, diversity of groups and the diversity of companies that are concerned about these bills. Internet engineers have spoken out, warning that the technical provisions that were included in the Protect IP Act and in SOPA would have dire consequences for online security. You have venture capitalists that are concerned about how these bills raise the start-up costs for new businesses online. Wikipedia is concerned about how these bills could give private actors the ability to pressure Wikipedia to possibly censor or block unwanted content, even if it's factually true, even if it's sightable from their pages. You have human rights groups that are concerned about how these bills would not only undermine free speech online, but also undermine the U.S. moral authority to criticize internet censorship regimes abroad. Both the Protect IP Act and SOPA had a fair amount of sponsorship and original support in their respective chambers of Congress. I think a lot of people on the Hill have recognized that they did not understand the dire consequences these bills had and they needed to go back to the drawing board to actually make sure that they're not going to fringe on free speech online. We've seen in the House is that the markup that was originally proposed for this week for the Stop Online Piracy Act has been delayed until a future date. The Protect IP Act was originally up for a motion vote next Tuesday after the protests this Wednesday. A lot of senators drew back their support and now that vote has even been delayed.