As protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act continue, the four remaining candidates for the Republican nomination for the President of the US have all formally declared their opposition to the proposed bill in the US Congress. News.com reports that in a TV debate among the four candidates on Thursday, none of them expressed any support for SOPA.
Former US House of Representatives speaker Newt Gingrich said in the debate on CNN that:
... you have virtually everybody who is technologically advanced, including Google and YouTube and Facebook and all the folks who say this is going to totally mess up the Internet. And the bill in its current form is written really badly and leads to a range of censorship that is totally unacceptable.
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney agreed with Gingrich, saying, "I think he got it just about right. The truth of the matter is that the law, as written, is far too intrusive, far too expensive, far too threatening, the freedom of speech and movement of information across the Internet."
Current US House of Representatives member Ron Paul also agreed, adding, "This bill is not going to pass. But watch out for the next one."
Former US Senator Rick Santorum also opposes SOPA but was the only one of the four candidates who felt that more needed to be done to protect the IP rights of the people and corporations from piracy. He said,
The Internet is not a free zone where anybody can do anything they want to do and trample the rights of other people, and particularly when we're talking about -- in this case, we're talking about entities offshore that are doing so, that are pirating things.
Ironically the four Republican US Presidential candidates agree with the current Obama administration which posted its own opposition to SOPA and to the similar Protect IP Act last weekend on the White House web site.
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