Lawmakers that support SOPA can say that they haven't been bought and paid for by special interest groups, but an article on MapLight shows that the 32 sponsors of the bill have received four times more campaign contributions from the entertainment industry than from tech companies that oppose it.

A software developer who goes by the nickname of "T Rizk," who thinks Congress will make the wrong decision on the SOPA anti-piracy bill, has decided to create a work-around before the bill ever becomes law. That work-around is a Firefox plug-in that he has named "DeSOPA." It basically unblocks sites like The Pirate Bay by reverting the blocked site back to its raw IP address.

The "We The People" section of the White House's official web site features a petition asking the Obama Administration to veto SOPA and any future bills that threaten to "diminish the free flow of information" on the Internet. From the text of the petition:

It must be tough to push hard for bills like the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP when your employees or members are downloading illegal files. According to a report on TorrentFreak, someone from both Homeland Security and the RIAA (the trade group that represents the music industry) have been downloading popular music. The IP addresses associated with these groups were unearthed on YouHaveDownloaded.com, a site that databases the IP's and downloads of Torrent users.

In a post entitled "Congress Must Not Trample Internet Users in Rush to Pass Copyright Legislation," Free Press Action Fund Political Adviser Joel Kelsey issued a short statement on the ongoing situation in Washington over SOPA.

If you were smart enough to avoid the committee hearing yesterday (it went on for a very long time), but care that SOPA doesn't pass in the U.S. House, then you should check out these clips put together by California Congressman (R) Daryl Issa's staff. The clips also feature California Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), and Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO). As you watch these clips taken from yesterday's hearings it is clear which side of this issue is well-informed and which is not interested in the information being presented to them.

As members of Congress fight amongst themselves about SOPA in committee today, one site is outing proponents of the bill for illegally downloading copyrighted material. This is according to YouHaveDownloaded.com, which tracks IP addresses that use BitTorrent sites.  With those IP addresses in hand, the site then matches them with a list of files that have been downloaded.

Today, a group of 83 Internet inventors and engineers sent an open letter to members of the United States Congress, voicing their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA bills that are under consideration in the House and Senate. Vint Cerf, co-designer of TCP/IP; Jim Gettys, editor of the HTTP/1.1 protocol standards; Paul Vixie, author of BIND, the most widely-used DNS server software; and Elizabeth Feinler, director of the Network Information Center (NIC) at SRI International are just some of the names that have signed this letter.

Interested in watching a (not-so-bad-looking) Congressional staffer read SOPA language into the record? Listen in here: http://keepthewebopen.com/sopa Snarky comments welcome in the GP Shoutbox.

House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) fired back strongly at critics of SOPA Wednesday, accusing various tech companies and their executives of not understanding the bill. He made a point of singling out Google for its opposition, calling it "self-serving."

A multitude of journalists have finally come out publicly against SOPA, the bill sponsored by Lamar Smith (R-Texas) that fights so-called "rogue" websites that traffic in copyrighted software and counterfeit goods. Wednesday the American Newspaper Editors Association joined online rights groups, consumer groups, and tech companies in opposition of SOPA (and the Senate bill Protect IP) by sending Congress a letter to ask that it stop the bill.