This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 20, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Protect IP and its companion, The Stop Online Piracy Act, appear to be on the ropes after a groundswell of public opposition.

The recent seizure of the site, Mega Upload, may offer some limited instruction about what a world

under Protect IP might look like.

Julian Sanchez, research fellow at the Cato Institute, comments.

On Friday morning, just a couple days after an unprecedented act of widespread internet protest against controversial

anti-piracy legislation. Harry Reed in the Senate announced that he would not be

bringing the Protect IP Act for a cloture vote on the 24th.

And Lamar Smith, the sponsor in the House of the Stop Online Piracy Act,

announced that he was shelving it for the time being, reversing a

previous pledge to move forward with markup on the bill in February. This is a

really kind of amazing victory for distributed internet activism when you consider

that just a couple of months ago both of these bills were considered a Faeacompley.

It was believed that with the immense lobbying power of the

recording industry, the movie industry, much of the software industry behind this

legislation there was really nothing that could be done to stop it.

We saw supporters on Wednesday in response to an internet blackout pulling their support in droves. I mean abandoning the bills faster than I've

seen anything in Washington abandoned since Anthony Wiener got a little too frisky on

Twitter. This demonstrates, I think, a really important fact about how the internet is transforming politics.

Every good political scientist understands that political outcomes are basically determined by the transaction costs of organizing.

What that means is if you think of a particular piece of pork that's worth a billion dollars to five big companies. It's pretty

...