The series of anti-SOPA activism going on today has already claimed an early victory. Marco Rubio, the Florida Senator and Tea Party favorite, dropped his support after being a co-sponsor of the bill. Now other Senators are starting to announce their opposition.

The U.S. House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation and the Senate’s Protect IP Act (PIPA) are the talk of the Internet primarily because both bills, in an attempt to address third-party copyright infringement and online piracy, are an overreach that threatens free speech and brings into question the scope of “fair use.”

Wired is censored today. So is TBogg’s mini-site. The Google doodle is blacked out. And part of Daily Kos. And a lead story at The Huffington Post. And even right here. Sites like Wikipedia and Reddit and I Can Haz Cheezburger and Raw Story and Informed Comment and thousands more are completely dark today, not providing any content. It’s part of the largest online strike in history.

There’s a very good TBogg post on ___ that he wrote and FDL would have run this a.m., but if Congress passes legislation that allows the internet to be censored and sites like ours to be shut down arbitrarily by unaccountable government or corporations, you might never know what you’re missing. You can help unblock this post.

Despite the fact that SOPA looks dead in the House, PIPA, the Senate’s version of anti-piracy legislation, hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s true that six Republicans wrote to Harry Reid asking for a postponement of the bill. Now Wikipedia will join others in shutting down on Wednesday to protest the bills.

The opposition to a pair of copyright protection bills that could lead to Internet censorship has grown over the past week. The Online News Association delivered its opposition to the bills, joining the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the State Department is backing off, and the GOP’s Paul Ryan has announced his opposition. But there’s little mainline news coverage.

The Internet censorship bills, SOPA and PIPA, bouncing around Congress don’t really work unless you apply them globally. If other countries do not vigorously protect their entertainment and high-tech industry’s copyrights in the same way as the United States, those industries will lose market share domestically. So the US has taken to pressuring other countries to pass anti-piracy laws through their legislatures. And this pressure rose to the level of threats, we have now learned from leaked letters.

Let’s define some terms here. The Internet censorship bills have different names depending on which chamber of Congress you’re talking about. The House bill is called SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. That bill is currently in the committee process and has not yet cleared the Judiciary Committee. Observers thought this would happen at the end of last year, but House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith cancelled the conclusion of the markup at the last minute.

But in the Senate, the Judiciary Committee has already cleared their version of the legislation, known as PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Property Act.

The vote on SOPA has been delayed until early next year, which may give online petitioners opposed to the act time to gather more signatures–they have 29,000 and counting. And it may give the RIAA and several studios time to explain a wee little problem they have: Someone/s at the RIAA has downloaded sixty full episodes of Dexter, according to a program which logged the BitTorrent activity of some 50 million users.

When the House Judiciary Committee adjourned without a final vote on the Stop Online Piracy Act, the expectation was that they wouldn’t take up the matter again until next year. HJC Chairman Lamar Smith appeared to agree to allow technical experts give testimony on the implications of the bill to the Internet’s architecture, particularly the Domain Name System. But quietly, Smith announced a resumption of the markup for this Wednesday, at a time when Congress may not even be in session.