Author of U.S. Online Piracy Bill Vows Not to Buckle

“It is amazing to me that the opponents apparently don’t want to protect American consumers and businesses,” Republican Representative Lamar Smith told Reuters in a telephone interview.

“Are they somehow benefitting by directing customers to these foreign websites? Do they profit from selling advertising to these foreign websites? And if they do, they need to be stopped. And I don’t mind taking that on.”

The Stop Online Piracy Act, which is before the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee chaired by Smith, aims to fight online piracy of pharmaceuticals, music and other consumer products by allowing the Department of Justice to seek federal court injunctions against foreign-based websites.

Smith said Internet counterfeiters cost American consumers, businesses, inventors and workers some $100 billion a year, though critics accuse him of exaggerating.

Under the bill, if a judge agrees that websites offer material that violates U.S. copyright laws, Internet service providers could be required to block access to foreign sites and U.S. online ad networks could be required to stop ads and search engines barred from directly linking to them.

Heavyweights such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit oppose the bill, which came under fire at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Reddit chief executive Alexis Ohanian has said it would “cripple the Internet” and pledged to take his social media site dark for one day next week to protest the bill.

“This (SOPA) could potentially obliterate the entire tech industry – a job-creating industry,” Ohanian wrote on his blog.

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