Responding to two petitions opposing the SOPA anti-piracy bill, the Obama Administration, quite late into the game, has made clear its stance on the matter of new anti-piracy legislation involving the internet.
The administration's underlying line is that whilst it wishes for "new tools needed in the global flight against piracy and counterfeiting" it also wishes to continue to "vigorously defended an open Internet based on the values of free expression, privacy, security and innovation."
Despite what we thought was a well considered response to the matter of anti-piracy and internet rights, SOPA supporters such as Rupert Murdoch have already taken the opportunity to lash out their frustration against the Whitehouse's lack of unilateral support for their whims; below is just one of several twits:
Mr Murdoch also lashed out at Google, "Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying." A rich sentiment, coming from a man who's own subsidiary firm, News of the World, often broke the law, committing acts of phone hacking as it saw fit. Google's response was simply "This is just nonsense. Last year we took down 5 million infringing web pages from our search results and invested more than $60 million in the fight against bad ads ... Like many other tech companies, we believe that there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking US companies to censor the Internet."
The fight over SOPA continues. On the next page is the full statement released from the Whitehouse.
