SOPA Question Presented To Candidates At Republican Debate (VIDEO)

In a sign of just how dramatically public opinion has swung against the Internet anti-piracy legislation up for a vote next week in the Senate, all four GOP candidates said at Thursday evening's primary debate they opposed it, though Rick Santorum seemed, entirely unsurprisingly, the least comfortable with the notion that, as he put it, "anything goes" on the Internet. (Google it.)

"I favor freedom. I think that we have a patent office, we have copyright law," said Newt Gingrich, rejecting "the idea that we're going to preemptively have the government start censoring."

Mitt Romney agreed. "I think he got it just about right," he said, calling the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) "far too intrusive, far too expansive," and worrying that it could have "a potentially depressing impact" on the growth and development of the Internet.

"If we can find a way to very narrowly go after pirating," said Romney, "we should do that."

Ron Paul noted that he was the first Republican to oppose the bill in the House. He said he was pleased to hear establishment Republicans coming around to his position. "Republicans unfortunately have been on the wrong side of this issue," he said.

Santorum, meanwhile, seemed to be penned in by the unanimous opposition. "I agree with everybody up here that it goes too far," he said, before launching into a defense of regulating the Internet in order to attack piracy. "I'm for free, but I'm not for people abusing the law and I think something proper should be done," he said.

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Comments

[radikal76]

04:06 PM on 01/21/2012

The only candidate whose answer I was sure of before it was given was Ron Paul's. He's also the only one I completely trust on the answer they gave.

[nattxn]

03:05 PM on 01/21/2012

Republican candidates are against a republican sponsered bill. Most everyone I know is against this and the sponsers are dropping like flies.

[Mr Crabs]

09:49 PM on 01/20/2012

The moderators should ask about SOPA in the next debat. I'd love to hear Gingrich yell about how they shouldn't be asking questions dealing with policies, flip flopping, legislation, ethics, racism, tax fairness, unemployment, income inequality, economic mobility, jobs, the environment, and international policy. They should stick to what's important like how much they hate Obama.

[ran6110]

04:20 PM on 01/20/2012

So, are they really against it or just responding to the online anger over the bills?

Remember, Obama was against against NAFTA until he got into office and then he decided it wasn't that bad. And while he was assuring the NAFTA haters (most of us) he was going to get rid of it he was quietly telling Canada & Mexico it was only campaign rhetoric.

[mac2jr]

02:41 PM on 01/20/2012

Copyrighted material from NationofChange -- "Kucinich Announces Constitutional Amendment to Publicly Finance Federal Elections

Dennis Kucinich, Op-Ed: On the eve of the second anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling known as Citizens United, which opened the floodgate of unlimited, shadowy corporate spending in public elections, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has introduced H. J. Res. 100, a constitutional amendment to rescue American democracy from corporate money’s corrupting influence."

[todfrapri]

02:26 PM on 01/20/2012

Gingrich picks one year. What about the last 10?

[razaminaz]

01:54 PM on 01/20/2012

We need less government control and more freedoms! I still don't think they should be allowed to tap phones without a warrant.

[Guy Fratianni]

02:32 PM on 01/20/2012

Pandora's box was opened by the last administration and this administration sadly has allowed it yet this man is in office is supposed to know the Constitution.

[teabagmetos]

01:00 PM on 01/20/2012

Piracy was around long before the internet, before Cd's and DVD's, it was VCR and Beta, before that it was cassettes. before that it was 8 track, and I'm sure before that someone did it with vinyl. SOPA and PIPA literally give the Feds the ability to shut down sites with videos of Police Brutality at protests gone viral.

[teabagmetos]

12:30 PM on 01/20/2012

Here's how I see it ! If Hollywood wants to keep their intellectual property ( Music and Movies ) proprietary, then confine it to the TV Theaters and Radio. However once you start selling it in every Wal Mart on a "known" copyable medium VCR or CD , DVD whatever, then you have forfeited your proprietary rights as far as copying and passing it around goes, the only right they would have left is the sales of bootleg copies. Now lets say I buy a bunch of Movie DVD's and make them available for free viewing and get a bunch of advertisers to pay for commercial adds, I say thats free enterprise since I bought and paid for the DVD's.

[razaminaz]

01:56 PM on 01/20/2012

So, we should do away with patent and copywrite laws? You should go into politics with ethics like those.

[teabagmetos]

03:13 PM on 01/20/2012

I never said we should do away with them, we should define the term, as it is it either means whatever the business wants it to mean or what the user wants it to mean.

[JoAnn Kennedy]

12:24 PM on 01/20/2012

How is that bull? Explain yourself with facts please, that all of US can look up like links ? Online Privacy/Priracy Act is designed to legally snoop. Richard Nixon was impeached for the same -- but let's face it he was a R and it's the Dems that want to be able to censor and easedrop whenever they want. ALL SOPA is, is an avenue to take away Freedom of speech, Communism calls it a trip to the guloog -- here it's a trip to the FUSION Center by the Dept. Of Homeland Security Military.

[razaminaz]

01:57 PM on 01/20/2012

Nixon was a saint compared to the ones that came after him.

[vigoddess]

12:10 PM on 01/20/2012

It will take the Republicans years to clean up the mess they created
by following the Grover Norquist pledge and going after President
Obama at any price, even if it allows the country to go into default,
and a financial crisis, and their latest endeavor is to control the
Internet which remains as the only form of a threat to re elect
President Obama again, because we all know it's main source
of supplying money towards his campaign and information
that offers the true happenings that is going on. We got to
see the people we elected, and for the first time in history,
that didn't come from Rupert Murdoch's newspapers or
his ownership of tv media. That's why he's raising his
fist against the Internet power and nothing else.
The Republicans have a worse problem than SOPA.
They have destroyed their own party and have
lost credibility, even with the candidates they
selected that people watch to see them as a
form of entertainment and nothing else.

[fmmedway]

11:55 AM on 01/20/2012

File this one in the anything for a vote column. The two main sponsors of the SOPA bill were republicans, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Lamar Smith, and the new darling of the conservative right, one who is seen by some as a possible vice presidential condidate, the Cuban Fraud himself, Sen. Marco Rubio. Now these two "gentlemen" have withdrawn their support for legislation they sponsored. Typical republican bait and switch. As a moderate democrat, I'm personally not in favor of SOPA, but that's neither here nor there. If one sponsors a bill, I would think that means one believes in what one has sponsored. Now that the opposition is getting a voice you back down. Wow! No backbones to these republican opportunists. And these are the type of people running for the republican nomination? What hath we wrought?

[hjalmar]

11:50 AM on 01/20/2012

OT: Ryan Grim, good job on Diane Rehm Show (NPR) this morning!

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-01-20/friday-news-roundup-domestic

[teabagmetos]

11:44 AM on 01/20/2012

Theis is by FAR and WIDE the most absurd spin the Republicans have concocted to place blame or take credit. Obama rejected a week ago, this bill his contributors support, The Republicans supported untill yesterday this bill their contributors didn't. This is just another bad bill written by lobbyists never read by Congress, rejected by the People. Thanks to OWS Congress is wising up and taking a closer look at the crap they are doing !

[lobwedge39]

11:37 AM on 01/20/2012

A bunch of wafflers.