The House Judiciary Committee Markup of SOPA,  the Stop Online Piracy Act just ended.

The House Judiciary Committee halted its contentious markup of the Sat approximately 1:30 pm this afternoon.

The hearing started yesterday around 10 am with a one hour reading of the bill and did not stop until 9:30 pm.

According to Phil Corwin of the ICA which listened to the hearing non-stop for the two days, “prior to halting the markup, Chairman Smith committed to hold either a hearing and/or a classified briefing for Committee members in regard to whether the bill’s ISP and search engine domain blocking provisions present cybersecurity issues. Smith said that the markup will resume at the earliest practical date in the 2nd session.”

“The House is scheduled to come back in session the week of January 16th, but as a practical matter, that action on the bill does not resume until early February.”

There is also expected in 2012 going to be an introduction of a less invasive Bill sponsored by Rep. Issa called OPEN legislation.

The Senate PIPA counterpart bill, S, 968, is still on the table.

I listened to a few hours of the session yesterday and while many of the house members supported the underlying message of the bill, many also expressed concern that the bill was being pushed through too quickly and without proper hearings on the matter especially from the Tech guys or Geeks as they were called,  to see whether the bill could be technically implemented.

Its an issue that is in my opinion going to get addressed with some legislation in 2012.

Something that all domain holders, registrars, parking companies and others in our space need to watch carefully.

You can read another account of this here.