Groups urge Congress to take it slow on piracy

A coalition of about 70 advocacy groups and companies sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to take their time in drafting anti-piracy legislation.

"Now is the time for Congress to take a breath, step back, and approach the issues from a fresh perspective," the groups wrote. "The concerns are too fundamental and too numerous to be fully addressed through hasty revisions to these bills. Nor can they be addressed by closed door negotiations among a small set of inside the-beltway stakeholders." The letter was signed by advocacy groups including Public Knowledge, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Free Press, Amnesty International and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Companies such as Mozilla, reddit and Twitpic also signed the letter. The groups argued that Congress paid too much attention to the interests of the entertainment industry and not enough to the interests of the Web community when drafting SOPA and PIPA. "The Internet’s value to the public makes it necessary that any legislative debate in this area be open, transparent, and sufficiently deliberative to allow the full range of interested parties to offer input and to evaluate specific proposals," the groups wrote. "To avoid doing so would be to repeat the mistakes of SOPA and PIPA."