> Graphics Interchange Format... was dropped from every usage all over the net in the blink of an eye and replaced by a fresh-new format named Portable Network Graphics.

If by "in the blink of an eye" they mean "over the course of about a decade, gradually, and with hanging-on remnants even today"....

The LZW patent has expired in 2003. GIF usage is now free.

Also, you can probably blame the slow adoption of PNG on Internet Explorer, which dictated what became a standard on the web and what not.

SOPA is bad news. Worse than Unisys claiming GIF. Worse than UMinn claiming gopher. Yes, we can replace the DNS system. But we can't escape the financial world:

Quick review in case you missed where BitCoins went: dollars will always have intrinsic value because the US Government demands payment in dollars. Tax payments are only accepted as an electronic transfer - from the institutions SOPA controls.

So SOPA is bad news because:

1. You can't escape the bank-controlled economy, so you will always need US dollars or whichever currency is accepted in your country.

2. You can't prevent large organizations (those with hefty legal departments) from issuing at-will takedowns on competitors.

3. Takedowns won't be just for The Pirate Bay. Good luck winning your court case.

I'm pretty skeptical of alternative payment systems, but just because you need some dollars doesn't mean you have to do all business in dollars. Realistically any successful cyber-currency would have a transition period anyway.

You seem to have a key unquestioned assumption, namely that alternative currencies and their associated economies will never reach a sufficiently large breadth of services to make it possible to do without existing national currencies entirely. I'd question that assumption. I don't think we've gotten close to that yet, but I wouldn't dismiss the possibility of it occurring in the future.

Good point. Any alternative currency must first achieve a level of legitimacy on par with FDIC-insured institutions and governments. By the time they do achieve that, I assume their board of directors will include enough ties to existing economies to make them no more an alternative (as in, capable of defying SOPA) than any existing institutions or governments.

I simply believe this is the only chance to retain freedom of speech. SOPA must be defeated.

As much credit as we owe to thieves, for pointing out weaknesses in security of a house.

So, when this bill is passed, presumably people will point the finger at MPAA/RIAA companies, and start taking them off the net?

This power is reserved for those secure enough against legal backlash to perjure themselves. Just like DMCA takedown notices.

Copyright holders with lots of resources can issue as many bogus DMCA notices as they like, safe in the knowledge that they can fight out or settle the (unlikely) lawsuit if it comes. Most people issuing fake takedown requests would expose themselves to a lot more risk.

I think you are correct here.

EDIT: However it has been shown that some of the content companies have been less than diligent in their issuing of takedown notices. This could easily backfire on them..

Or you find someone with nothing to loose (i.e. no assets to loose).

I wonder who gets the ability to point fingers.

The article didn't really say, all it said was "The copyright industry gains the right to “notify” payment processors such as Visa that a company looks bad"

Sounds like places that sell for 58p (1p cheaper than itunes) could be taken down easier than places just giving it away.

I know I will.

The P2P world is just full of unintended consequences:

How litigation only spurred on P2P file sharing: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/279763,how-litigation-only-spu...

Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3227844

In summary, as the penalties for filesharing increased, filesharing was pushed further into the underground, and filesharers adopted protocols like Bittorrent that are more difficult to kill with a court order than Napster was.

BitTorrent seems quite awful from that perspective. For quite a while, torrents required a centralized tracker to coordinate operation, which provided a single point of failure. Even now, with trackerless operation, BitTorrent has no directory or search protocols, no privacy protection or built-in anonymity, and otherwise makes it trivial for anyone to obtain a full list of IP addresses downloading any given torrent.

I wouldn't call BitTorrent "underground" or "difficult to kill" at all. For that, you'd probably want something like Freenet or GNUnet.