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Recommend OPEN Season on Counterfeiters? Congress Quickly Bends to Online Pressure (Email)

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Last week, Congress went from PIPA and SOPA to OPEN.

These are the acronyms for the federal bills aimed at curbing the sale of counterfeit goods through foreign Web sites.

It was a remarkable change. Congress had broadly supported the Senate’s Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PIPA or PROTECT-IP) and the House’s similar Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Indeed, the Senate was scheduled to vote on PIPA on Jan. 20.

But Google, Wikipedia, and other online providers fought back. They argued the bills’ authorizing the Justice Department to order search engine providers to remove foreign Web sites that sold counterfeit goods from search engine results — rendering them invisible for practical purposes — constituted censorship, turned search engine providers into the Internet police, and unfairly threatened them with liability if they did not comply.


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