[6] Wyden first introduced OPEN in the Senate (S. 2029) on December 17, 2011, with co-sponsors Jerry Moran of Kansas and Maria Cantwell of Washington.

[7][8][9] On January 14, 2012, in response to two White House petitions, White House technology officials Victoria Espinel, Aneesh Chopra, and Howard Schmidt stated: "Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small...We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet.

[2][17] The Consumer Electronics Association commended the sponsors of the bill, calling it "a quick, effective way to shut down pirate sites without damaging legitimate companies or enriching trial lawyers".

[20][21] The MPAA rejects any law that fails to block Americans' access to The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracker which survived prosecution in its home country of Sweden and steadfastly refuses to remove information about infringing downloads from its search index.

[22][23] The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wrote that the legislation "addresses many of the most glaring flaws in both SOPA and PIPA" but stated that it is continuing to review and analyze the draft.

[19] Center for Democracy and Technology senior policy counsel Eric Sohn said that the bill's definitions "appear to carefully target true bad actors—the ones who are willfully fostering widespread infringement--while excluding general purpose platforms and social networking services", whose financial focus would "starve those bad actors of their financial lifeblood, rather than pursuing the futile and costly approach of messing with the Internet's addressing system".

[3] Copyright Alliance executive director Sandra Aistars called the OPEN Act "impractical for individual artists and creators", who would be required to argue in Washington before the trade commission rather than in their home jurisdictions, during a period of up to 18 months.

[25] Writing in the Huffington Post, Aistars argued that the bill placed more obstacles for individual artists than for corporate litigants seeking patent remedies before the ITC, saying that fees proposed for complainants in the action were "unprecedented" and incompatible with "justice for all", while third parties profiting from the infringement could argue for the decision to be overturned by the Administration without paying any fee.