Only hours after Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) announced that he was delaying a vote on the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the sponsor of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), followed suit and announced he would be delaying consideration of the companion legislation.
“I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy,” Smith said. “It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.”
“The Committee will continue work with both copyright owners and Internet companies to develop proposals that combat online piracy and protect America’s intellectual property,” Smith continued. “We welcome input from all organizations and individuals who have an honest difference of opinion about how best to address this widespread problem.”
Former Senator Chris Dodd, head of Motion Picture Association of America, seemed to admit defeat as well. ”With today’s announcement, we hope the dynamics of the conversation can change and become a sincere discussion about how best to protect the millions of American jobs affected by the theft of American intellectual property,” he said in a statement. “It is incumbent that they now sincerely work with all of us to achieve a meaningful solution to this critically important goal.”
While the general idea of SOPA and PIPA may return sometime down the line in redesigned form, their present forms, and names, are done for good. A key figure in the fight against SOPA was Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). Issa planned to use his perch as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to highlight the flaws of SOPA’s DNS blocking provisions. His intentions were to hold a hearing featuring the testimony of actual technical experts, something that Smith’s hearings on the bill failed to include. Wednesday’s internet protests were scheduled to coincide with the hearings, but Issa scrapped his hearing after receiving assurances that the DNS provisions would be dropped from SOPA. The protests against SOPA and PIPA definitely continued and were very successful.
“Supporters of the Internet deserve credit for pressing advocates of SOPA and PIPA to back away from an effort to ram through controversial legislation,” Issa said in a Friday statement. “Over the last two months, the intense popular effort to stop SOPA and PIPA has defeated an effort that once looked unstoppable.”
“Postponing the Senate vote on PIPA removes the imminent threat to the Internet, but it’s not over yet,” Issa continued. “Copyright infringement remains a serious problem and any solution must be targeted, effective, and consistent with how the Internet works.”
Source: Ars Technica
Google Maps Navigation has been up to some tricks as of late. Now, they are becoming a threat to quite a bit of in-car GPS businesses. What did they do to “up the ante?” They added a real-time traffic re-routing technology into their Android app. The app has actually had the ability, as one could see when they first open the app, to access traffic information for quite awhile, but Google found their ultimate medicine so to speak when adding this new feature. They use multiple sources to retrieve traffic information, including both current and historical information about the user’s selected route. Some people have been skeptical, as technically the app is still in beta in North America and Europe. However, this Android app is the best navigation app I have ever used personally, and the fact that it is still named “beta” should have no affect on your decision to use it. Honestly, I can’t even decipher why they still are using the “beta” title.
Looks like I’ll have to be careful around the office for awhile, being cautious about not getting in anyone’s way. Google has changed up their game as of yesterday. They tweaked their search algorithms to help prevent content farming, or sites that are either spam or created with little value and placed higher on the rankings than they deserve to be. Basically, Google hopes to make the search results more relevant with these tweaks.
