BREAKING: GoDaddy No Longer Supports SOPA

2 min read Original article ↗

Mashable Image

Credit:

"As a company that is all about innovation, with our own technology and in support of our customers, Go Daddy is rooted in the idea of First Amendment Rights and believes 100 percent that the Internet is a key engine for our new economy," GoDaddy CEO Warren Adelman said in a statement.

Hundreds of website operators moved or threatened to move their domains away from GoDaddy after the company's inclusion on a list of nearly 150 backers of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) released by the United States House of Representatives judiciary committee gained widespread attention online earlier this week.

The company also said that it has removed blog postings discussing areas of the bill it did support, "in an effort to eliminate any confusion about its reversal on SOPA."

"GoDaddy has always fought to preserve the intellectual property rights of third parties, and will continue to do so in the future," general counsel Christine Jones said in the statement.

SOPA is a fervently debated piece of legislation that would greatly enhance the powers of companies and the U.S. Justice Department to effectively censor websites they deem to infringe on copyright holders.

“The game changer with SOPA is that it gives private entities an enforcement mechanism that previously only existed with a court order,” Ross Dannenberg of the intellectual property law firm Banner & Witcoff told Mashable on Thursday.