SOPA, PIPA postponed: Nice work, everyone

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the PROTECT-IP Act, known as PIPA, have both been postponed from being voted on in the House and Senate respectively.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the author of SOPA, said today that he will postpone any further action on the bill until compromises were reached.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said in a tweet that "in light of recent events", he has, "decided to postpone Tuesday's vote" on the PIPA bill.

An impending vote on SOPA triggered widespread protests leaving hundreds of millions of Web users without access to their favourite sites.

Though both bills have been shelved, both SOPA and PIPA are far from dead. What is clear, however, is that the bills will not return in their current form.

A statement from the White House last week made it clear that the President could veto such bills should they pass across his desk if Congress passed them.

By the numbers: over 75,000 websites were blacked out during Wednesday's online protest, with 160 million people seeing Wikipedia's blacked out pages alone. 4.5 million people signed Google's anti-SOPA petition, and an estimated 2--4 million anti-SOPA and PIPA messages were tweeted.

This isn't Washington losing. This is Washington listening to the people that it represents. The delay of any action on SOPA and PIPA is a victory for us all, from news publications to ordinary folks on the street.

Nice work, everyone.

Image credit: CNET.

Related:

• Gallery: Black Wednesday: The day the Web went dark
• David Gewirtz: 5 reasons why SOPA, PIPA and other legislative idiocy will never die
• Geeks 1, Congress 0: Controversial anti-piracy bill SOPA 'shelved'
• Unless Facebook, Google blackout, SOPA will succeed: Here’s what you can do
• Reddit will enact ‘nuclear option’ to protest SOPA, PIPA
• Reddit’s anti-SOPA “nuclear” protest is a good start
• SOPA: Why the ‘broken web’ should stay broken
• Google, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook consider ‘nuclear’ blackout
• Go Daddy really and truly opposes SOPA now
• ZDNet Government: Dear Congress, guess what? We already have copyright laws
• London Calling: U.S. ‘threatened to blacklist Spain’ over SOPA-style law
• CNET: DNS provision pulled from SOPA, victory for opponents
• How SOPA would affect you: FAQ