AFTER this week a lot more people will know that SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act. Some 30m-40m of them, estimated Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, could have gone to the English-language version of his website on January 18th only to find it replaced by a dark, foreboding page headlined “Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge” and explaining SOPA's perils. A few other sites such as Reddit, a popular link-sharing service, shuttered themselves too, while Google blacked out its logo for American users, who number about 56m a day.

The backlash against SOPA has taken the bill's supporters—media firms and others who want tougher protection for intellectual property—by surprise. The House of Representatives Judiciary Committee seemed to be hustling it through: the first hearing in November was stacked with friendly witnesses and just one opponent, from Google. But now it is getting bogged down. Even before blackout day, the White House had weighed in with criticisms; Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, was said to have promised not to hold a floor vote until there was consensus; and Lamar Smith and Patrick Leahy, respectively the sponsors of SOPA and its marginally milder Senate sibling, the PROTECT IP Act or PIPA, suggested cutting out one of the most controversial provisions pending further discussion.

Both SOPA and PIPA target websites outside the United States that carry pirated content. Since American law cannot directly touch such sites, SOPA would allow copyright holders to ask American sites to take down links to them, payment processors and ad networks to stop doing business with them, and internet-service providers to block traffic to them via a technique known as DNS filtering. If these firms failed to act within five days, they could then be sued.

To music and film executives, who want to defend their intellectual property from theft, such measures are the last line of defence against an explosion of pirated content, much of it carried on foreign sites. Critics, who include big companies like Google as well as start-ups and all manner of geeks, argue that the law could put a heavy burden on smaller American sites, stifle innovation and enable censorship, and that DNS filtering could disrupt the internet's addressing system, causing security problems. (Putting filtering on hold at least for now is Messrs Smith and Leahy's proposed sacrifice.)

Those critics are therefore now claiming victory for the net-heads polity against big business and its lobbyists on Capitol Hill—and with some justification. The bills have powerful backers: according to OpenSecrets.org, which publishes political finance data, between July 2009 and June 2011 pro-SOPA interest groups donated $85m to members of the House and $45m to senators, while the anti camp gave $17m and $27m respectively. (How much has been spent lobbying for and against the bills themselves is not known.)

Yet the battle lines are not drawn neatly, either along the traditional liberal-conservative divide or along the money trails. In Congress, supporters and opponents alike come from both parties and from all generations. Some big beneficiaries of media money oppose the bills, and some who got more from the internet industry in 2010 support them. Outside Congress SOPA's critics tend to lean left, but their right-wing bedfellows include Michele Bachmann, the tea party's recent lamented presidential hopeful, the Heritage Foundation and various conservative pundits wary of intrusive regulation.

In fact, the only place where support for SOPA and PIPA is almost unmixed is in the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, whose members count the media industry among their most generous donors. Assured of a friendly hearing there, the media industry seems to be in shock at the intrusion of politics from the outside world. The Motion Picture Association of America accused the sites holding blackouts of an “abuse of power” and a “gimmick” that turned their users into “corporate pawns”. (Wikipedia is a non-profit.)

But the pawns are also voters, and the bills are now an election issue. One of SOPA's leading supporters, Bob Goodlatte, a representative from Virginia, faces an election challenge from a Democrat and a Republican who are both anti-SOPA. Another Republican, Paul Ryan, found himself the target of a campaign on Reddit after sending a constituent a non-commital letter about SOPA. Whether or not for that reason, Mr Ryan subsequently came down against the bill.

Mr Ryan's stance may have influenced the decisions to remove DNS filtering from SOPA and PIPA. He chairs the House Budget Committee, a powerful job. Darrell Issa, one of SOPA's few opponents on the Judiciary Committee, has meanwhile played a clever hand with net-savvy voters by proposing an alternative bill, called OPEN, which waters down the harshest provisions, and—better still—putting it up on a website for editing by the public. Others take a different tack: instead of a blanket law, they say, it would be better to beef up investigations and enforcement against the few big offenders.

The proposed watering-down of the bills is only temporary, however, and PIPA is still due for a Senate committee hearing on January 24th. But getting the bills passed in an election year was always a long shot, and the well-organised furore makes it increasingly likely that legislators will be inclined to shelve them at least until next year. That would indeed be a victory for the pirates.