Hollywood’s blockbuster anti-piracy bill imploded like a box-office bomb this week. | REUTERS SOPA's surprise Hollywood ending

After getting panned on the Web, Hollywood’s blockbuster anti-piracy bill imploded like a box-office bomb this week — and Washington realized the Internet’s “series of tubes” now may have more clout than the vaunted motion picture and music industries.

By the time Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) called a time of death on the PROTECT IP Act on Friday, it already had been trampled by a stampede of one-time supporters anxious to distance themselves from the political threat of a Web-driven uprising against the bill. Lying alongside it: The House’s Stop Online Piracy Act.


The story is one not of a moment but of a movement — the political coalescence of Web companies and their users to defeat the threat from an entertainment industry that got caught flat-footed and failed to fight back effectively.

“I think the tech groups truly felt threatened and got organized like they’ve never been organized before,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) told POLITICO on Friday. “They have ignored Washington D.C., but this was a real wake-up call for them.”

That wake-up call rang the loudest during the first hours of Wednesday morning, when Wikipedia darkened its English-language site, Google blacked out its logo on its homepage, and Reddit and thousands of other websites went dark.

The public outcry that followed led to the rapid unraveling of the bills and victory cheers of Internet crusaders.

But just last month, the story was quite the opposite, and Hollywood had the upper hand.

The Senate bill enjoyed widespread support for the better part of 2011. It was voted unanimously out of the Judiciary Committee last spring, already had more than 40 bipartisan co-sponsors and had backing from the powerful Hollywood lobbies, labor unions and the Chamber of Commerce.

The only obstacle in the bill’s path was Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who rallied against the bill from the start. He persuaded Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to commit to stymie any effort to fast-track it to a floor vote.

In the House, trouble started for SOPA in mid-December during a combative two-day markup. The bill — also with wide bipartisan support — was expected to sail through the Judiciary Committee. But a small bloc of opponents — Chaffetz and Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Jared Polis (D-Colo.) — introduced a parade of amendments to tie the bill in knots.

Those amendments were shot down, but the damage had been done. Opponents of the bill forced Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) to freeze the markup until after the holidays. By then, SOPA and PIPA had become four-letter words.

As the debate heated up late last year,14-year-old Tanner Flake sent a text message to his congressman. "You're not going to vote for SOPA, are you, Dad?" he asked Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). Tanner had nothing to fear: Jeff Flake, who's running for Senate in Arizona, is an opponent.

Hitting the pause button in what had been a fast-moving process gave the technology industry time to regroup and come up with a strategy.

It was a perfect storm going into the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas — a convention of tech executives and Internet groupies known more for their gadgets than political activism.

The show served as an impromptu campaign headquarters, letting the Web-loving community coalesce around a broader, unified opposition to the legislation. A number of members of Congress — including Republicans Reps. Lee Terry of Nebraska and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who later reversed their positions on SOPA — were at the show to hear the quickening drumbeat of resistance from Silicon Valley types.

Issa and Wyden, by now known as the biggest foes of the two bills, held a joint news conference in Vegas and warned that the first few weeks of January would be the crucial time for opponents to sound the sirens and pressure supporters to back down.

Back in Washington, Web companies were already working their contacts. Users of Reddit began to organize a protest against GoDaddy, the nation’s largest domain register and a vocal supporter of the copyright bills. The effort worked, and GoDaddy ended up reversing its stance.

Reddit also targeted Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who had only issued a vague statement on the bill. A hit list of sorts was created by the site’s users to try to unseat incumbent lawmakers who backed the bills, and they started a thread on the site called “Operation Pull Ryan.”

A few weeks later, Ryan came out against the bill.

Those turnarounds showed that “it wasn’t just going to be an inside game of educating members but an outside game of bringing political pressure to bear on the bill,” said Patrick Ruffini, who heads Don’t Censor the Net, a coalition that targeted the bills.

The technology industry, led by Net Coalition — whose members include Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and Wikipedia — took advantage of the growing momentum and blanketed the Hill with lobbyists. Word spread that major websites were planning to protest the bills, further riling up the Internet community.

Smith and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) tried to quell the criticism.

Last week, they made a major concession by removing one of the most controversial pieces of the bills that would have let the government block access to Web addresses of accused rogue sites. They hoped that would be an olive branch to the tech community.

But it wasn’t enough, and lawmakers’ concerns with the bills kept mounting. Six Republican senators, including Judiciary Committee ranking member Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), urged Reid last Friday to delay the upcoming vote to iron out problems — but Reid rejected that request.

In the House, Issa sent out a statement early Saturday revealing that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) assured him that SOPA wouldn’t move to the floor for a vote until a consensus was reached.

Just a few hours later, the White House finally broke its silence and posted a blog critical of parts of the bills. The administration toed a careful line in its response so it wouldn’t disrupt two of the Democratic Party’s most loyal donors: Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

But the White House made it clear it was not enamored with either bill — the strongest sign yet that the entertainment industry’s stronghold was crumbling.

In response, Reid went on “Meet the Press” on Sunday morning and touted PIPA as “jobs-saving,” but acknowledged that it “could create some problems” and hoped a middle-ground compromise could come to fruition so the Senate “could move forward with this.”

By Tuesday, hostility toward SOPA in the House had infected PIPA in the Senate, according to sources involved in the fight.

Some senators who had signed onto the legislation began expressing buyer’s remorse.

Counsels on the Senate Judiciary Committee held a five-hour meeting late Tuesday with entertainment and tech companies in hopes of finding a viable path forward.

But even with the threat of Wednesday’s blackout looming, the negotiators made no progress toward a deal.

Early Wednesday morning — when the blackout was in full swing — congressional offices were inundated with phone calls from constituents urging them to vote against SOPA and PIPA. The deluge of Web traffic knocked some members’ websites offline.

In the House, Republican SOPA co-sponsors Ben Quayle of Arizona, a Judiciary Committee member, and Terry pulled their support for the bill. Blackburn, an ardent stumper for the legislation, called on the House to “scrap the bill and start over.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who had been an active and engaged co-sponsor, announced that he wouldn’t vote for the bill in its current form. Dozens of lawmakers — some of them co-sponsors — followed suit, announcing their opposition.

Grassley, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, and former Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) withdrew their support for the PIPA.

“I never saw the wind come out of the sails of something so effing fast in my life,” said one lobbyist working for a tech company.

Leahy and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) who had worked together on a bipartisan overhaul of patent laws last year, scrambled to salvage a compromise.

“I think we could have gotten to fair and balanced but still effective legislation,” said a Democratic aide involved in the negotiations.

But Grassley and Hatch kept their distance, making it clear that Kyl would be operating without the support of key GOP players in the discussion.

Rank-and-file Democratic senators were getting nervous, too, displeased with the popular uprising against the bill.

Reid decided Thursday that he wouldn’t whip Democratic senators on a procedural test vote scheduled for Tuesday. Later that night, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called on Reid to pull the bill from Tuesday’s floor schedule. That was a sign to close observers of the Senate; McConnell has a penchant for releasing statements that call for a certain course of action that will soon follow.

Democratic sources said Thursday that the bill was still on track for a vote, but by Friday morning, Reid’s office had taken to Twitter to announce that no vote would be held.

Shortly after, Smith, SOPA's chief proponent, indefinitely put off consideration of the bill in the House.

The bill’s proponents say there’s a short window in which they could adjust the bill and bring it back to the floor — at least in the Senate.

But they’ll have to wait until the heat from this round of the battle dies down while being careful not to wait too long and risk getting bogged down in the presidential election cycle. That’s a real danger, given that all four Republican presidential candidates said at a debate Thursday night that they opposed the bills in their current form.

“Given how toxic the atmosphere is right now, it’s not a right-away thing. Anything we did right now would just be criticized,” the Democratic aide said. “Sooner rather than later.”

Sources on all sides of the debate said the entertainment industry failed to fully engage all of the resources at its fingertips, from big-name celebrities to well-trafficked websites.

That's why lawmakers and lobbyists are reticent when it comes to the question of whether upstart tech companies have seized power from the old-line entertainment industry.

Whether it's in this Congress or the next, both sides expect a second act — and the entertainment folks aren't likely to bring a knife to a gunfight again.

Michelle Quinn contributed to this report.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 6:45 p.m. on January 20, 2012.

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