Miss Ginger Lee, the Tennessee adult-film actress who once called disgraced former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner her “trifecta of win,” does not like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The porn star, with whom Weiner once exchanged racy photos, reblogged on her Tumblr account Wednesday a post written on the Tumblr staff blog opposing SOPA.
SOPA, sponsored by Republican House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, would give the Justice Department jurisdiction over foreign websites that facilitate copyright infringement. Justice would have to prove in court that the site is illegal and violates U.S. copyright law before obtaining a court order to block it or sever its financial ties.
The bill — heavily criticized by politicians, social networking sites and political advocacy groups for its “broad reach” — has bipartisan support from 31 cosponsors and many business and advocacy groups.
The Tumblr staff blog directed readers to a site dedicated to SOPA opposition, called I Work for the Internet, and asked them to spread the word.
Lee reposted the blog on her account and then added, “Done.”
Mashable reported that Tumblr, a politically active social networking company that has been quite outspoken against the bill, created Fight for the Future, “a site which breaks down what it believes to be the three major threats of SOPA, also called the E-PARASITE Act.” But Fight for the Future actually predates Tumblr’s engagement on the issue.
Fight for the Future was originally the “coalition” behind FreeBieber.org, a social media campaign directed against Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar’s own anti-piracy bill. Tiffiniy Cheng, Fight for the Future’s director at the time, told The Daily Caller that Bieber was the “perfect example representing The American Dream.”
TechDirt has called Fight for the Future a group that “almost no one has ever heard of.”
California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa recently joined the Sprint lobby group Public Knowledge and the advocacy group Demand Progress — a project of Aaron Schwartz, the founder of the social news site Redditt — in November to publicly oppose SOPA. Issa introduced his own piracy bill this week.
Issa issued a statement Tuesday criticizing SOPA because of the “broad new powers to police the Internet” that would fall to Attorney General Eric Holder’s DOJ. Smith responded that those in opposition to SOPA rely more “on fiction rather than facts,” and that opposing the legislation because of Holder “demeans” the work of the rest of the Obama administration’s Justice Department.
SOPA saw a full committee markup Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee.