Schiff Still SOPA Proponent as Opposition Mounts

By Dean Lee

With the treat looming that a number of popular internet sites —opposed to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)— are poised Wednesday to “blackout” their services, including Wikipedia and the user-generated news link startup Reddit, Congressman Adam Schiff said Thursday, that he not only still supports the bill but thinks it necessary to stop overseas intellectual property theft of American goods.

Schiff is one of 12 original co-sponsors of the bill, known as H.R. 3261, introduced in October by Representative Lamar Smith of Texas.

“These are my constituents that are losing jobs because of this [pirated movies/TV] and a lot of the theft of this comes out of L.A. and out of our neighborhood,” he said.

Opponents of the bill included CEOs of some of the largest technology companies on Earth, including Google, Twitter, Yahoo, PayPal, eBay and craigslist.

In an open letter authored by, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, Jack Dorsey co-founder of Twitter and Arianna Huffington co-founder of the Huffington Post among others, says SOPA threatens the existence of the internet.

Their concerns rage from the bills requirement that file sharing sites and search engines must monitor what users link to, or upload; to implications that it would deny website owners the right to due process of law giving the government, in what opponents say, amounts to censorship.

Schiff, optimistic, said he thinks the bill is being improved.

“There have been some amendments that have been adopted in committee to address some of the concerns the have been raised,” he said. “The goal is really focused on these foreign websites that are the venue for massive amounts of theft of American work product.”

In December The House Judiciary Committee held three markup sessions, one lasting over 10 hours. Schiff said the bill was currently still in markup and would again be heard Tuesday when the House convenes.

Reports from Computerworld.com, at the time, said about 20 amendments designed to address SOPA concerns were voted down.

The bills leading supporters include the Motion Picture Association of America, and the Recording Industry Association of America. Schiff said companies are losing billions of dollars and thousands of jobs to overseas pirating.