How Republican opposition derailed SOPA and Protect IP

Feb 1, 2012 by jaridpj

Ever since GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole claimed that Hollywood produced “nightmares of depravity” that coarsened American culture and made “deviancy” mainstream, movie studios and record labels have enjoyed a spectacularly uneasy relationship with the Republican Party.

Copyright has been the exception to that strife: since the late 1990s, Hollywood-backed proposals to expand copyright law–the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Induce Act, the Pro-IP Act–have all been embraced, or at least not opposed, by Republicans.

During President Obama’s Google+ chat this week, he stopped short of saying he opposes SOPA.

The controversy over the Protect IP Act and theStop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, has finally splintered that alliance.

In a Google+ hangout this week, President Obama carefully avoided criticizing SOPA. “I think that it’s going to be possible for us” to find a workable approach, he predicted. During his State of the Union Address a week earlier, Obama echoed a Hollywood talking point, saying that “movies, music, and software” must not be “pirated.”