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Until the American public began to rally against it, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its counterpart in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), may have been some of the least-disputed pieces of legislation to cross the U.S. Congress this session.
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Both the House and Senate bills have scores of bipartisan support, ranging from conservative heavyweight Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., a well-known liberal and current chair of the Democratic National Committee. While the legislation -- which aims to combat copyright infringement by allowing U.S. authorities to take legal action against foreign Web sites that specialize in trafficking intellectual property and counterfeit goods, as well as sites accused of enabling them -- may have sailed through Congress, Web companies and Internet junkies have broadened the debate, recasting it from one about piracy and digital copyright protection to a movement to defend Internet freedom.
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"Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia," read Wikipedia.org on Wednesday, which disabled much of its Web site for 24 hours along with Boing Boing, Reddit, Wired and hundreds of others to protest the anti-piracy bills.
On its "blacked out" web page, the site included a box for users' to enter their ZIP codes in order to contact their local representatives about the bills.
The House and Senate representatives who support SOPA and PIPA may be wide-ranging, but some of the notable individuals who have signed on -- and even some who have spoken out against it -- may be surprising.
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Support: Democrats Slightly Outweigh Republicans
Forty-two Democratic members of the House and Senate have expressed their support of the anti-piracy legislation, according to a comprehensive chart compiled by ProPublica.org, which assembled its database based on the proposed bills' sponsorship and the members' voting record in relation to the current bills' precursors and alternatives.
The chart also contains the amount of campaign contributions each senator or representative has recently received from entertainment industry, which has reportedly invested millions in lobbying to fight for the passage of SOPA and PIPA.
The public may have framed the debate as one to protect Americans' freedom of speech and expression, but some of Congress' most liberal members have lent their support to the anti-piracy bills.
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn.
Franken, who defended the importance of Internet freedom when the House attempted to defund the Federal Communication Commission'snet neutrality enforcement last year, was one of the 40 senators to co-sponsor PIPA.
"We must protect American jobs from piracy, which has become rampant on the Internet. We don't tolerate shoplifters in stores and we should not tolerate them online," Franken wrote in a letter to a constituent explaining the need for PIPA, available on OpenCongress. "Right now, a company has no way to enforce its rights if it finds that its products are being pirated or counterfeited on a website hosted overseas."
Franken received almost $89,000 from the television, film and recording industry during the 2010 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. During the 2008 cycle, the same industries donated more than $780,000 toward his reelection bid. Franken worked in the entertainment sector for decades before entering politics.
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.
