Then these countries will have less of a leg to stand on when criticizing less open countries; who will be able to say: actually you are no different to us, the only difference is that we are more honest about the fact that we prioritize other things above freedom and cultural advancement.
I dunno, my guess is there must be a lot of money involved.
Video is an interesting case since much of it is explicitly embeddable; you can't encourage embedding and then call it copyright infringement.
All they need to do is can claim "infringement" without having to prove anything, without any obligation of fairness, correctness, and no penalty when wrong. After that your website is taken offline, your income is frozen, your income disappears and only then you may sue to get it all back, without any possibility of being compensated for your time and expenses.
The problem is that there is no neutral, objective oversight before damage is done and no compensation of damages caused by wrongful enforcement, which leaves us without protection against overzealous, perhaps even full automated, enforcement.
I doubt they would have any legal basis for extraditing a non-US-citizen for a SOPA violation, but there have been attempts to pursue charges against foreign citizens for notable DMCA violations if they enter the US, so that could continue to be the case with SOPA. If a US citizen uses a foreign server, I doubt that would shield them from legal action.
If these peers choose to ignore ARIN's edict, it raises a number of troubling questions, mind you - so we don't really want to go that route if we don't have to. But the point is, Canadian ISPs could very well take a stand against the US using ARIN to enforce SOPA overseas.
However, I think the people campaigning for opposition have failed to use 'normal' words to explain how it will affect the masses. For us here that have startups and are interested in these things, words like 'infringe copyright', 'safe-habour' etc make sense.
All 90% of the masses need to know is this: If you paste that funny clip you saw on MTV on your Facebook, MTV can shut down Facebook or sue you.
If you put that image you Googled on your blog, ALL your adsense money can be seized. If you Tweet it, you Twitter account can be closed.
When 'the masses' hear this, it would make no sense cos it doesn't. We should "dumb down" the message to get it accross to the 'mainstream' populace
I just wonder why the US legislature would want to deliberately cripple US's strength on the web.