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As soon as the news broke that Netflix had registered a political action committee called FLIXPAC, speculation that one of the items on its agenda would include anti-piracy legislation soon morphed into headlines like “NETFLIX FORMS PRO-SOPA PAC.” I’m not linking them on purpose.
Netflix has issued an official statement saying that neither SOPA nor PIPA is behind their formation of the PAC.
"PACs are commonplace for companies that lead a big, growing market and Netflix is no exception. Our PAC is a way for our employees to support candidates that understand our business and technology. It was not set up for the purpose of supporting SOPA or PIPA. Instead, Netflix has engaged on other issues including network neutrality, bandwidth caps, usage based billing and reforming the Video Privacy Protection Act."
Aside from the fact that any company would have to be braindead or crazy to publicly associate itself with one of the least popular bills in the history of the Internet, Netflix took a publicly neutral stance around the time of the debates. Politico does speculate that their private stance might have been more aggressive, however.
The word "copyright" is listed on the registration, but Netflix would be foolish to pick this as its hill to die on. While its stance on anti-piracy laws will be interesting to watch the next time legislation pushes the issue, for now I think we can believe it when it says that’s not what’s behind the PAC.
