There are numerous examples of "creative people" making good money out of their work on the internet, without worrying about piracy too much.
Just think about this, your revenue as an iOS dev could be culled because someone in the app store ecosystem infringed. How is that a good way to combat piracy? The pirates are going to pirate no matter what road block you set up.
And even if that were true, it's not automatically a good thing. iOS developers might end up better off through eating into consumer surplus, rather than creating more aggregate value.
Without SOPA: Let's pretend that there is an innovative site that is going to be made in a few years that allows people to submit things to it and sell. This site gives some creative person a chance to make a full living. (this is actually happening now in many places)
With SOPA: Two options: Site either does not get created at all because of fear of creating sites that might cross SOPA at some point or this site gets taken fully off the internet because some other user on it posted some sort of infringing material for an indefinite period of time. in either case the creative person is out of luck with respect to making a living from their creative work.
[1] Could be that the website owner polices their site effectively, or maybe they grease enough palms to keep their site. The reason doesn't matter. The point is, there are other possible outcomes.
None of which are good. Either the site is taken down, an onerous burden is placed on the site owner to do the copyright owners' job of policing content, or yet another arbitrarily enforced law sits on the books, waiting for some enterprising media exec or prosecutor to contort it around their case of the day.
The content producers need to make lawful content delivery a better experience than pirating things. I love steam because it makes things much easier to download, install and keep up to date. It's a better experience all around.
I am all for taking down websites that are gross offenders but this legislation is like cutting off your foot because you stubbed your toe.
But I am not sure enforcement measures against piracy would actually help "creative people" much if at all. Cory Doctorow is a prime example who makes his work freely available but makes his living through his creative work. Perfect enforcement of copyright wouldn't have virtually no impact on his situation.
Obviously, that is just one anecdote. But we can see every single person making their living off of creative work as a counter-example right now as a counter-point since Piracy is currently rampant and while there is enforcement it is minimal compared to the emount of piracy that happens.
Plus there's a certain amount of inevitable piracy. But mostly it's the bought-out politicians who are just trying/lying too hard.
Eliminating our civil liberties will not strengthen copyright enforcement. Nor is strengthening protections of intellectual property a sufficient excuse for such.
