Last week, we brought Florida readers news about the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sister piece of legislation, the Protect IP Act.

Many popular websites, such as Reddit and Wikipedia, went dark last Wednesday to protest the copyright protection measures, which would have required websites to monitor user-uploaded content for copyrighted material, among other things. The blackout seemed to have the intended effect because several key lawmakers withdrew their support from the bills and now PIPA and SOPA proponents seem to be back at Square One.

Several industry players whose livelihoods depend on intellectual property protections like copyrights, trademarks and patents are not happy. The chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America, for example, expressed frustration with the failure of SOPA and PIPA. He has a legitimate claim when he says that if people are allowed to pirate copyrighted material (in his case, movies and television shows), that will have a very deleterious economic impact on the entertainment industry because it will not be able to make money off its product, as it should be able to.

But as we said in our last post, people are allowed to use some copyrighted material for certain uses, such as parody or instruction. There was a lot of concern that SOPA and PIPA would have chilled these uses and turned the Internet into a police state.

It is safe to say that SOPA and PIPA were not perfect, but it also fair to say innovators deserve to be paid for their work and that the Internet has resulted in a lot of their work being given away for free. It will be interesting to see if PIPA and SOPA proponents can regroup and come up with something on which we all agree.

Source: Computer World, "SOPA and PIPA: What went wrong?" Grant Gross, Jan 23, 2012