MPAA CEO and former Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) said that a much-reviled anti-online piracy bill known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is “dead,” Bloomberg Businessweek reported Thursday morning.
Dodd’s full comments on the bill, which came during a taping of “Conversations with Judy Woodruff” on Bloomberg Television set to air this weekend, were: “It’s gone. In my view, it’s dead.”
Those remarks come after Dodd just one week earlier told The Hollywood Reporter that discussions between Hollywood and Silicon Valley representatives on SOPA and/or new anti-online piracy legislation were likely ongoing, leading many, including TPM, to infer that SOPA could be revived. An MPAA spokesperson later walked back these statements, saying that “SOPA is gone.”
Still, advocacy groups that in January led successful mass online protests against the bill and its Senate counterpart, PROTECT IP, told TPM that they were regrouping their forces in order to fight any new legislation of its type, including a bill known as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which has been erroneously conflated with SOPA.