> 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.