Remember - SOPA is not designed to stop piracy - there are hundreds (thousands) of mechanisms for file sharing that your average government policy will have no impact on. What it will do, is make it burdensome for 99% of the non-nerd population.
As long as the 99% are impacted, the entertainment industry really don't care about that final 1% trading files to their hearts galore. This isn't about principal - it's pure economics.
That myth that "this will make it hard for the 99%" thing has been trotted out during every single anti-piracy failure ever. (There have been no lasting successes.) Once the "smart cow" opens the barn door for everyone else, it's open. Every single cow can just walk right out and it will be too late when you go to close it. It's like we're playing a game where we flip a fair coin. Heads, I win. Tails, we flip it again. And yet people still think that maybe next time it will work.
Think we can make it up with even harsher punishments? Well, the Great Firewall of China leaks like a sieve. Incidentally, they also use a form of DNS blocking, as I understand it (something like spoofed NXDOMAIN replies).
I would call the dramatic decline in the relative size of the peer-to-peer music "sharing" world to the iTunes world a lasting success. Steve was right that 99¢/track was a winning proposition, but it's easy to forget how effective the RIAA's legal and technical jamming efforts were at pushing Napster and friends out of the mainstream.
Yet even now, there are still people who will screw the fans in a futile attempt to stop piracy. And even when iTunes opened, it was trivial to download anything in the catalog for free. Yet we can see how popular it is for people to do things legitimately in spite of this.
Not so sure. I've tried explaining bittorent to several non nerd friends and they all say "oh I'll just watch it streaming".
Things like this spread fast, especially among young people. The reason people stick with streams today is because they have no motivation to learn anything else.
The RIAA/MPA and friends are concerned about the 247.5 million people - less concerned about the 2.5 million people.
It's why Usenet basically contains every single media property of interest - the decent search engines for it are pretty much buried in the blacknet, and will stay there, out of sight of the 99%.
Try and purchase Game of Thrones. I spent 20 minutes looking for a mechanism I could purchase it - no luck.
http://www.amazon.com/Game-Thrones-Song-Fire-Book/dp/0553386...
http://www.amazon.com/Game-Thrones-Complete-First-Season/dp/...
All this will take is a Facebook post of "Hey, install this plug-in and you can access all the things!" and suddenly the 99% are on board.
That said, if you don't think there's going to be an installer/.reg file/some easy fire and forget way to switch a computer's DNS to an uncensored one for techies to send to their friends, you're being shortsighted.
...etc
Look how easy it is to download stuff off bandcamp or Amazon's mp3 store. People still use iTunes even though AAC is a PITA.
Direct Connect uses IPs for connecting to hubs. There are no web interfaces either. Instead you have to download and install the DC++ client.
Lots of people that aren't in the "99% of the non-nerd population" are using it - in fact by my estimates there aren't a lot of nerds as the nerds have moved on to torrents.
I know people who are closer to computer neophyte than computer nerd using DC++ successfully.
Reason? Network effects and availability of content not available on torrents.
Moving to static IP addresses puts the owner of that RIR block in jeopardy.
Napster was sued out of existence, went bankrupt, and shut down.
If SOPA passes, it will be a multi-billion dollar wealth transfer from the Internet Industry, and our personal freedoms, to the Entertainment industry. It will be effective in at at least two (Negatively impacting our freedoms, and the Internet Industry) - remains to be seen if it will benefit the Entertainment Industry.
"Oh, they'll just block those searches" you'll say, and then maybe they will, but then they'll re-phrase it. They'll ask around and, lo and behold, someone they know will know someone that can "fix" it. Maybe even for a price!
Napster tried to crack down on pirated music one time and people switched from literal spellings to Pig-Latin in a heartbeat. You wanted "Metallica" and you'd search for "Etallicamay". Word travels fast. How are you proposing to subvert that? People can adapt faster than laws.
What it will affect is site operators simply trying to make a living and having to deal with being DNS blocked all the time. Startups will fail. People will lose their digital possessions because one of the users on the site where they chose to store them was flagged for a copyright violation.
Legitimate users and businesses want a consistent, predicable identity. Shady ones could not care less how often they have to switch domains, IPs, service providers, nor how hard they are to find by the average user. They're underground. It's all word of mouth and word of mouth doesn't care about DNS filters.
It is simply not possible to block something on the internet. There is always a way around it. Look at how locked down some corporate networks are and people have found ways to bust out using HTTP or DNS tunnelling.
Torrents are attractive because it's easy to download content. If you go shut down the search engines for torrents - people will move onto the next easiest option - iTunes, Amazon, etc...
I would go further; it is a greed/exploitative problem.
You have every type of good in the world manufactured/produced/farmed/coded/filmed/etc. for far less than what the retail cost is. (the initial arguement is supply and demand) -- but that is simply false. Look at profits and margins.
Apple and every oil company in the world is the perfect example of why this is true.
Their supply is NOT in concordance with demand. Their profits and margins show this.
Other business models have proven this out; make things cost less - and more people will buy.
Actually, to Apples credit - this is an area where they are showing this; Apps that cost ~.99 are seen to be a value to the user at that cost thus paid apps make tons. (However, if you look at margins, again Apple fails. Their margin on paid apps is between 100% and ~5% (if you try to figure in the cost of the overall infrastructure to supply the apps (i*Device development etc. though the mobile market has a lot of outlying factors which refudiate the margin cost to apple, whereas the iPad is a device wholly dependent on the app market)
As to iPad's many people buy tablets and never load a single app on them. Unlike consoles where the device is subsidized by the software sold apple treats it's app store as revenue neutral. They have income but they poor it back into iOS development, because long term the OS with the best software wins and they can still make fat margins on the devices themselves.
People know that copyright infringement is not lawful though, don't they. They just don't care.
Same way people know the speed limit but don't care to abide by it
People know that copyright infringement is not lawful though, don't they. Generally, they just don't care.
Like speed limits on roads. People don't care enough to strictly abide by the law, or moralise their non-compliance in some other way - late at night, good conditions, law is silly, nobody around, etc..
Actually, the thinking seems to be, you don't have to convince them, you just throw them to jail or fine them.
Step 1: Media companies need to understand the Internet. I honestly don't think they're actively trying to take freedoms from us. I think they just still don't "get" the web and haven't come up with a business model that takes advantage of it yet.
Step 2: once they "get it" they could use the tools they already have more effectively and attempt to use the web to their advantage without SOPA.
Put yourself in the shoes of the people at the media companies who are behind this for a minute. You're an old, probably conservative, wealthy person who is most likely hyper aware of anything going on that's entertainment related. To you it seems like theres far more of your company's content online than there should be and because you're in the media business you perceive the web to be an entertainment medium and nothing more. It dawns on you that since you're in control of content distributed through TV, the movies, and other conventional platforms (like DVD and BluRay) you should also be able to have control over this new entertainment medium too! It doesn't occur to you that the web is of, for, and by the people because the media has really never worked that way.
As hackers we're easily able to see the big picture and understand that the web isn't just one big On-Demand entertainment network. To us it's about entertainment as much as it is about communicating, working, sharing knowledge, education, art, and so on. But these people are viewing it from an outdated perspective.
I think that if we really want to make a change here we need to quit assuming that this is only about power and control for the sake of power and control. This isn't good vs. evil here, it's just two competing world views. If we understood why they believe they should be able to implement SOPA-like initiatives then we'd be better equipped to stop the problem at its root.
Anyone with an interest in using pirate sites will simply switch to alternate DNS providers, there will always be a way, and legitimate users will be subject to rampant and arbitrary censorship in the name of "stopping piracy".
You can't stop piracy. It's a supply and demand problem. It's a perception problem.
How can you convince someone that the TV show that is broadcast for free over the air is legal, but downloading exactly the same show at a later time is illegal?
Companies have all the tools they need to reduce piracy but they refuse to use them, instead trying to extort money from people through more conventional means. They'd rather have ten sales at $20 than thousands at $1.