Lamar Smith

Lamar Seeligson Smith served as a U.S. Representative from Texas’s 21st congressional district from January 3, 1987 to January 3, 2019. He is present in this collection because, as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, he introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act in October 2011 and announced its postponement on January 20, 2012, two days after a coordinated protest by major websites.

Congressional Career

Smith was born in San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas, on November 19, 1947. He worked as a business and financial writer at The Christian Science Monitor from 1970 to 1972, took a law degree in 1975 and practised in San Antonio, served in the Texas state house in 1981-1982 and as a Bexar County commissioner from 1982 to 1985.

He was elected to the 100th Congress and to the fifteen succeeding Congresses — sixteen terms in all — and was not a candidate for reelection in 2018. His district covered Bandera, Blanco, Comal, Kendall, Kerr and Real counties in full and parts of Bexar and Travis counties, giving him portions of both San Antonio and Austin; his district offices were in San Antonio, Austin and Kerrville.

The Biographical Directory records three committee chairmanships: the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct in the 106th Congress, the Committee on the Judiciary in the 112th Congress (2011-2013), and the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in the 113th through 115th Congresses (2013-2019).

The Stop Online Piracy Act

Smith introduced H.R. 3261 on October 26, 2011, with eleven original cosponsors, and it was referred to the Judiciary Committee he chaired. The bill’s stated purpose was “combating the theft of U.S. property.”

Its central mechanism was section 102. On application by the Attorney General, a court could order action against a “foreign infringing site.” Once served with such an order, a service provider had five days to take “technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States,” including measures “designed to prevent the domain name of the foreign infringing site … from resolving to that domain name’s Internet Protocol address” — that is, DNS blocking. Internet search engines had the same five days to prevent the site “from being served as a direct hypertext link,” and payment network providers and internet advertising services faced parallel cut-off obligations. Title II added criminal provisions covering the streaming of copyrighted works and trafficking in inherently dangerous goods.

The committee held hearings on November 16, 2011, discharged the Intellectual Property subcommittee on December 14, and held markup sessions on December 15 and 16, 2011. It never reported the bill. H.R. 3261’s status on Congress.gov remains “Introduced,” and its action history ends with the December 16 markup.

January 2012

On January 13, 2012, Smith announced he would remove the DNS-blocking provision from the bill, saying that “after consultation with industry groups across the country, I feel we should remove Domain Name System blocking … so that the Committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision.” He said the bill would keep its provisions that “follow the money.”

On January 16, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that the English Wikipedia community had voted to black out the site worldwide for 24 hours beginning at 05:00 UTC on January 18, in protest of SOPA and PIPA. More than 1,800 Wikipedians took part in the 72-hour discussion, and roughly 55 percent of those who supported a blackout wanted it to be global rather than limited to United States readers. It was the first protest of that kind by the English Wikipedia. Google, in a post published the evening of January 17, said it was “censoring our homepage logo and asking you to petition Congress,” and noted that Wikipedia was down and WordPress dark.

Smith issued a statement on January 18 responding to reports that members were dropping their support. He said he was “confident that ultimately the facts will overcome fears,” that “contrary to critics’ claims, SOPA does not censor the Internet,” and that it targeted only foreign sites engaged in conduct already illegal.

The congressional record shows eight cosponsors formally withdrawing from H.R. 3261: one on January 17, two on January 18, four on January 23 and one on January 24. Twenty-three cosponsors remained on the bill.

On January 20, 2012, responding to the Senate’s decision to postpone its vote on the PROTECT IP Act, Smith said “it is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves.” The release concluded: “The House Judiciary Committee will postpone consideration of the legislation until there is wider agreement on a solution.” The bill was not withdrawn and no further action was taken on it.

Online Presence

His official House website, as captured in January 2017, linked accounts at twitter.com/LamarSmithTX21, facebook.com/LamarSmithTX21 and youtube.com/user/lamarsmithtexas21. The site and those accounts are no longer live and no audience figures are recoverable from them.

What Is Not Established Here

This audit removed the claim that “dozens of congressional co-sponsors withdrew their support” in the days after the blackout. The congressional record for H.R. 3261 shows exactly eight withdrawals, and three of them fall in the January 17-18 window. Commentary at the time counted a larger number of members announcing opposition to SOPA and PIPA together, but that is a different quantity from cosponsor withdrawals on this bill, and no source consulted here supports the figure as written.

The description of Smith postponing action “indefinitely” was corrected. His January 20 release says the committee will postpone consideration “until there is wider agreement on a solution,” and frames the statement as a response to the Senate’s delay on PIPA rather than as an independent decision about SOPA.

Also removed for want of a source that met this project’s standard: the claim that thousands of other websites participated in the blackout; that online petitions collected several million signatures; that large numbers of people contacted Congress by phone and email; the attribution of support for the bill to the entertainment industry, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and major media companies as a stated fact; and the “Digital Political Impact” section, which consisted of the project’s own assessments of the episode’s significance rather than sourced statements. The followerCount field, which read “Limited social media presence,” was removed as an unsourced characterization. The claim that the committee’s chairmanship of Science, Space, and Technology ran to 2018 was corrected to January 2019, the end of the 115th Congress.

Smith’s chairmanship of the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct in the 106th Congress was added; the page had previously listed only two of his three chairmanships.