I think we should definitely be concerned that Twitter is bowing to pressure and allowing for the censorship of tweets in individual foreign countries.

After the death of PIPA this morning comes the news that Lamar Smith, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee who planned on resuming the markup of SOPA, the House version of anti-piracy legislation, in February, has put the bill into cold storage. The work of the grassroots coalition did the trick: SOPA and PIPA are dead for now.

[Editor's Note: For the Latest on PIPA, Vote Postponed.]

We are very close to being able to predict a loss for the Protect IP Act, or PIPA, in next week’s cloture vote in the Senate. According to the Open Congress whip count, which is user-generated and seems to have the most updated information, 33 Senators are either co-sponsors or leaning toward supporting PIPA, and 38 Senators are either confirmed No votes or leaning that way. As we all know, it takes 41 votes to block a cloture vote. So if the leaners pan out we’ll see cloture go down.

Yesterday’s SOPA strike was enormously successful, not only raising attention to the issue but moving a tremendous amount of politicians for a one-day event. Over 4.5 million people signed Google’s petition against SOPA. The Wikipedia action gave high-profile attention to the issue as well, and even if Facebook and Twitter’s responses were muted, overall the online community made themselves heard.

But those of us charting the protest yesterday were struck by how most of the lawmakers turning against the bill were Republicans. If you look at the latest whip count on PIPA, for example, you see that more Republicans oppose it at this point than Democrats.

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.

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.

The biggest Internet presence in the world will have something to add to the growing online protests against anti-piracy legislation, though they won’t go as far as shutting down their operations. Google plans to highlight the issue with an action item on their famously spare homepage.

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.

Pressure on House Republicans may have doomed anti-piracy legislation for the year. Darrell Issa, who along with Ron Wyden has been out in front of the opposition to SOPA and PIPA, the respective bills on this issue, says that he secured a promise from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor that no bill will hit the House floor without “consensus.”

The reaction to SOPA and PIPA, the latter which is scheduled to get a vote in the Senate when they come back to Washington, is not a Statement of Administration Policy, nor does it truly grapple with the legislation itself. Instead, the three Administration officials – IP Enforcement Coordinator for OMB Victoria Espinel, US Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, and Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt – lay out broad principles for what legislation to combat online piracy should look like. They do say that this statement of principles will guide “what the Administration will support—and what we will not support.” So it’s worth reading closely.