Foreign Affairs
A screengrab of the Google Doodle on France's election day last May.
As California's high-tech firms grew to become economic powerhouses
in the American economy, they punched below their weight politically.
For the most part, they are not very savvy about the ways of Washington
-- they came late to the lobbying game -- and their political strategies
were naïve compared with those of old industrial sectors like oil and
automobiles.
That seems to be changing. In January, a group of high-tech
heavyweights, including Google and Wikipedia, along with less prominent
combatants (155,000 Web sites in all)
and nonprofits such as Fight for the Future, joined in a massive online
blackout to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Since the bill's
introduction in May 2011, a wide mix of representatives from the film,
television, music, and publishing industries had been championing SOPA
and its sibling, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), two pieces of legislation
designed to address international theft of copyrighted U.S. intellectual
property.
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