SOPA: Hollywood Finally Gets A Chance to Break the Internet

Why not target markets and car boot sales for also enabling piracy?<p>Piracy seems to just be a convenient term/scapegoat that enables businesses that can't (or won't) consider adapting to a changing environment while dealing with the prolific infringers through the proper legal channels.<p>That's not to dismiss piracy in its entirety. More to say that a very complicated issue is being considered a black and white one on both sides. One that is so new that no one's really got a good idea of how best to tackle it yet.<p>This is evident rather clearly in approaches taken to battle piracy and defend it, such as DRM measures actually punishing the legit consumer for having the audacity to buy their product; and such as the ridiculous sense of entitlement some consumers have: that they have the god-given right to consume media for free.<p>Hence arguments arise, for example, about the ratio of downloads to lost sales (neither 1:1 or 1:0 as both sides would have you believe), how piracy is a victimless crime, how the internet is an insurmountable threat to big business' bottom line and other such bullshit.<p>Piracy as a concept will never truly stopped and pirates will never get all their content legitimately for free (without any sort of compromise). Hence the solution is good, old-fashioned innovation, and the willingness of businesses to constantly adapt to new opportunities and threats in their environment while considering their own strengths and weaknesses. The economy as businesses would like it to remain (free of regulation) is too harsh and remorseless for the old mammoths to survive.<p>And the legal system as it is is there to allow them to face the real piss-takers in court, and also to allow those individuals or businesses to defend themselves.<p>Sounds almost too sensible to be true.

This law sounds so bad I don't see how it really even benefits the big media companies. It seems it could be abused in the other direction too... The summary suggets that Visa,etc <i>have</i> to comply with all requests in five days. And all you need is to be a rights-holder, which is pretty much anyone (you only need to suspect infringement).<p>So every webcoder with even teh smallest IP could just issue takedowns to every major company site, claiming that the company website is holding IP-protected code. [A good portion of the time large company websites are in breach anyway]. And anyone with any publicity-related IP could issue takedowns to everyone with any connection to them.<p>Then no-one at all will be able to process any transactions online.

Half of me hopes things like this happen. Imagine what this would mean for sites like Google and Twitter? It's a ridiculous proposal, and it will not work.

&#62; <i>In essence, Hollywood is tired of those pesky laws that help protect innovation, economic growth, and creativity rather than outmoded business models. So they are trying to rewrite the rules, regulate the Internet, and damn the consequences for the rest of us.</i><p>"Hollywood" has been innovating, creating economic growth and, most of all, been the center of creativity for the most creative industries there are for some time. They are not tired of the pesky laws that protect those things. They are tired of the opposite. They are tired of existing laws designed to protect innovation, economic growth and creativity in the form of copyrighted IP going unenforced, and sites abusing the DMCA (Grooveshark is a great example).<p>I am not saying that I support this bill, and I'm not saying it shouldn't be stopped dead in its tracks. But it's so tiring to hear about big, bad Hollywood. You can't expect someone to lobby for a half measure, and especially when the opposing side wants nothing that gets passed to be enforceable. Either you shut down sites that are clearly infringing, or you insist on information about individual users so that it can be enforced on that level instead. As long as people keep infringing on peoples' property rights, one or the other solution will be proposed. The easiest way to stymie this debate is for people to stop taking things that don't belong to them and people who truly care about privacy and the rights of technology companies to speak intelligently about both sides of the issue instead of making stupid statements like the one above.