The Rumors of SOPA’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Everybody is cheering about the death of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA):

In a surprise move today, Representative Eric Cantor(R-VA) announced that he will stop all action on SOPA, effectively killing the bill.

Huzzah! Hurray! Let’s all go out for drinks and celebrate!

Before we do there is one minor detail that needs to be brought up, SOPA isn’t dead. While the house version, H.R.3261 is effectively dead, it’s sister bill in the Senate, S.968 the PROTECT-IP Act, is still alive and well:

PIPA is less well known than SOPA, but the provisions are basicly the same. It still includes the same DNS blocking and censoring system that the original SOPA did, just without the SOPA name. There are around 40 co-sponsors of the bill in the Senate so far, with no word on how many senators support the bill in addition to that. There will most likely need to be 60 votes in the Senate in order to invoke cloture and end an almost guaranteed filibuster.

Much like the need to remove every head of a hyra, both bills in our legislative body must be killed before this erroneous legislation is truly dead. Hell I’m pretty sure our “representatives” purposely gave the bills two different names in the hope one’s death would lull people into a false sense of security while the other bill was ramrodded through both houses and signed by the president.