Group protests committee interest in SOPA provision

11.07.2012
The Judiciary Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives is moving toward passage of a small portion of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, raising concerns among SOPA opponents.

The committee has released a draft bill, called the Intellectual Property Attaché ?t, which would expand that places intellectual property attaché³ in U.S. embassies overseas.

The attaché °rogram was not a controversial piece of SOPA, but digital rights group Public Knowledge on Wednesday accused the committee of rushing to pass the draft bill without public oversight.

Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican and chairman of the committee, floated the draft bill on Monday in the hope of voting on it in committee Tuesday, but has since pulled the bill from the committee's website. The quick time frame for voting on the bill led Public Knowledge to complain that the committee was trying to rush the legislation.

Smith was the chief sponsor of SOPA, a bill that would have required search engines, domain name registrars, online payment processors and other Web services to stop doing business with websites accused of copyright violations.

The draft bill had no legislative hearing and wasn't formally introduced, Public Knowledge said in a news release. After the failure of SOPA in Congress, about 70 groups called for a "more open, transparent, and deliberative process on bills dealing with intellectual property policy," Gigi Sohn, Public Knowledge's president, wrote in a letter to committee leaders. "The current approach to the Intellectual Property Attaché ¦ails to meet that standard."