Smith said SOPA won't be taken up as planned and Reid is calling off a cloture vote on PIPA. | AP Photos SOPA and PIPA dead, for now

House and Senate leaders abandoned plans to move on SOPA and PIPA on Friday — the surest sign yet that a wave of online protests have killed the controversial anti-piracy legislation for now and maybe forever.

SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said his committee won’t take up the bill as planned next month — and that he’d have to “wait until there is wider agreement on a solution” before moving forward.


Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, meanwhile, said he was calling off a cloture vote on PIPA he’d scheduled for Tuesday.

Reid tried to put on a brave face, saying in a statement that he was optimistic that progress could be made in the coming weeks. But there's no mistaking what happened. Many of the Senate bill’s co-sponsors have since come out against it, leaving Reid a no-win choice: Go forward with the cloture vote he'd planned for Tuesday and lose, or send the bill off into back-burner purgatory.

PIPA sponsor Patrick Leahy got the message — and he wasn’t happy about it.

In a steaming response to Reid's announcement, the Vermont Democrat said Internet thieves in China and Russia "are smugly watching how the United States Senate decided it was not even worth debating how to stop the overseas criminals from draining our economy.”

And he didn’t stop there. Leahy said “the day will come when the senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem.”

The double-barrel decisions to punt on the bill capped an extraordinary week of public pressure — and an extraordinary reversal of fortunes for Hollywood, whose lobbyists seemed to think they were on cruise control to passage of bills aimed at protecting their content from online thieves.

Over the weekend, the White House expressed concerns about the legislation. Over the next several days, co-sponsor after co-sponsor jumped ship. And Thursday night, the four remaining GOP presidential candidates all said they’d oppose the bills as currently drafted.

The sudden shift left Smith and Reid no choice but to punt. And the tech interests who fanned the flames of protests were quick to celebrate the decisions.

“Hallelujah!” tweeted Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of Consumer Electronics Association.

“Dems, Sen. Reid has just saved u from a lot of embarrassment/loss of support,” tweeted Gigi Sohn, co-founder of Public Knowledge, which had helped organize protests.

Reid insisted talks would continue between the warring sides — Hollywood and content providers are on one side and Silicon Valley and the tech community on the other.

"We made good progress through the discussions we've held in recent days, and I am optimistic that we can reach a compromise in the coming weeks," Reid said.

"There is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved,” Reid added. “Counterfeiting and piracy cost the American economy billions of dollars and thousands of jobs each year, with the movie industry alone supporting over 2.2 million jobs. We must take action to stop these illegal practices.”

And at least until Reid pulled the plug on the vote Friday, Leahy was said to be negotiating a compromise bill to strip out provisions that required search engines to block pirate sites and to lessen a clause allowing copyright holders to sue.

"I admire the work that Chairman Leahy has put into this bill,” Reid said. “I encourage him to continue engaging with all stakeholders to forge a balance between protecting Americans' intellectual property and maintaining openness and innovation on the Internet."

The decision to delay the vote strikes a fierce blow to Hollywood, which has been lobbying the Hill hard for months to pass anti-piracy legislation.

But it also signals the burgeoning strength of the tech industry, which said the legislation threatened the very openness of the Internet and would thwart innovation.

Like Leahy, Reid tried to reframe the debate in terms of American jobs and income.

“We live in a country where people rightfully expect to be fairly compensated for a day's work, whether that person is a miner in the high desert of Nevada, an independent band in New York City or a union worker on the back lots of a California movie studio,” Reid said in the statement.

But with members wary of another Internet backlash — and with attention turning to the presidential race — it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which the bills reach the floor of either chamber this year.

Smith, more than Reid, seemed to acknowledge the long road ahead.

"I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy,” he said. “It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products."

Kim Hart, David Saleh Rauf and Brooks Boliek contributed to this report.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 9:36 a.m. on January 20, 2012.