How would you design a bill to fight against online piracy?
Most piracy is more about convenience than price. Thousands of smarter people than me have written reams about this. Its like fighting obesity. You don't just take a drug and get a quick fix, it takes a different mindset that causes the patient to live a different kind of life.
You don't have to care about its morality in order to stop it (or at least sharply curtail it).
The internet has evolved into becoming our only defense against people in power ( be they governments or corporations ) conspiring to keep the status quo by keeping information from us. SOPA is their attempt at confiscating this wonderful tool we have for organisation and spreading information.
This discussion is part of a larger debate as to the balancing act of affording unchecked power to a selected group of people. Keep in mind, the ideal of democracy allowing the replacement of these powers DOES NOT WORK in real life. THIS is the real root of the problem. This entire debate reminds me of the Lokpal bill debate going on in India. Essentially asking – How do you police the police?
It's true, you wouldn't call the guys who created the atomic bomb mass murderers, however that doesn't change the disastrous consequences of their actions!
In the case of online piracy, as some have already said, part of the issue is convenience. But that is only a part of the issue (and this where netflixes, spotifies, and steams of the world come in). But you will never be able to stop people who rather pirate (either for financial reasons, symbolic reasons, etc.).
Now the question is, are you willing to give power to people who may abuse it to stop something that may be unstoppable or would you rather work on other means of curbing the issue.
We've already seen that this law is often misused by large-scale content creators (see: Warner and Hotfile, various music labels issuing takedowns on files uploaded by their own artists). I don't know why I should expect that giving additional power to those most likely to misuse it is a good idea.
