No, see, you're forgetting the six degrees of separation thing. All it takes is for someone who knows someone who knows someone to help them. They just need some plug-in or whatever to check their DNS against an uncensored one and their geek friends will probably be passing such things around in less than a week. I think someone already made that program actually, so I think the blocks are likely to be ineffective before they start.

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).

> 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.)

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.

That's not making it harder for people to infringe, that's making it easier for people to do things legitimately. I think I've posted many times on another article saying that it's an incredibly good way to do business and the resounding success of those who make it easy to legitimately acquire and enjoy their stuff proves it.

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.

"All it takes is for someone who knows someone who knows someone to help them"

Not so sure. I've tried explaining bittorent to several non nerd friends and they all say "oh I'll just watch it streaming".

I think that's a pretty strong argument in favor of piracy being a distribution problem that's solvable by better legitimate infrastructure. People take the path of least resistance. iTunes, Netflix, and Steam are all wildly successful because they've made it painless to obtain music, movies, and games - enough so that people use and prefer them over mechanisms that let them pirate the same content for free.

A decade ago - ALL my friends were using direct connect. Few of them were nerds, most were barely computer literate. But free movies made them motivated enough to learn. Some even ran their own hubs even though they had no interest in computers otherwise.

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.

mooki - If you do a survey, you'll find that maybe 1 in a hundred people have even heard of direct connect. It may be the case that all of your friends were using it - but in the scale of 250 million americans, I would be shocked to discover that more than 2.5 million of them indicated they had used Direct Connect to share a movie.

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%.

Streaming is simpler and the legal implications are a lot less dramatic, so why would anyone use bittorrent if given the choice?

Everything is available on the torrents/usenet. Everything. Not everything is available through streaming (or even for sale)

Try and purchase Game of Thrones. I spent 20 minutes looking for a mechanism I could purchase it - no luck.

You must be new to the internet, then:

http://www.amazon.com/Game-Thrones-Song-Fire-Book/dp/0553386...

I think he meant videos, which are on preorder and will only be released in March?

http://www.amazon.com/Game-Thrones-Complete-First-Season/dp/...

I know. That's why I said "given the choice".

Right now "Feh! forget torrent, i'll stream it instead" is probably a decent way. If laws like this pass, and you can't stream it, then people will learn about bittorrent

Bittorrent takes effort.

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.

Sounds like they already have an easy, legal alternative. Which most people seem to agree is the best way to beat piracy.

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.

Do you mean like one of the sites that has the file on a server somewhere in Sweden and lets you watch in crappy quality in a flash player? Or do they mean Netflix or something. If the former, then this legislation might be effective to stop them. If the latter, then they have the economic means to pay for convenience, which is the whole point of SOPA: make piracy inconvenient.

No I mean watching it on Megavideo (where you have to reboot your router every x min, watch it in small crappy format). Somehow "google a torrent file, download that file if it has enough seeds, open it with the torrent client and when it's done it will be in this folder on your hard drive", is too complicated.

I don't think he was justifying the punishments, but rather the logic. I can tell you, assuredly, that most users will be impeded by something as simple as DNS. Hell, look how simple it is to load up TOR--people still don't do it. Look how simple it is to port over to GMail--people still don't do it. Look how easy it is to use google to fir pirated music (e.g. "site:mediafire.com filetype:rar")--people STILL DON'T DO IT. Look how easy it is to use true crypt. People still don't do it. Look how easy it is to use a YubiKey with OTA--people still don't do it. Look how easy it is to use Google 2-factor auth. People still don't use it.

...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.

Where I live normal people are using Direct Connect for downloading pirated stuff, a protocol that's more popular than torrent here.

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.

Let me guess, somewhere in Eastern Europe?

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.

Yes, Eastern Europe.

I disagree. The younger population is far more technical than the current older population. Granted I live in a tech-y city (Seattle), and a lot of my friends are "internet savvy," but everyone I know that is under 35 torrents stuff. Simply making it harder to get to web sites will not stop "non-techy people" from pirating. Napster seemed to do really well and it didn't NEED DNS.

Torrents are not what I would consider a nerdy way of sharing files - and have some pretty straightforward DNS vulnerabilities. The first target of SOPA will be every worthwhile Torrent Search engine. Those sites will be taken down overnight.

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 I agree on all accounts. My point was that if SOPA passes I don't think it will stop the "99%."

It will impact precisely 0% of the users that want to access pirated material. They will Google for solutions and they will find them.

"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.

I'm suggesting it will impact 99% of the casual users who just want content, and will impact 0% of the dedicated users who care enough to bypass those measures.

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...