You're absolutely right. I always support any effort to fight these laws. I just don't think they're likely to succeed.
> we ALSO need to fight for more sane copyright rules
I don't think there will ever be "sane" copyright rules. Copyright itself is insane. It was sane before computers existed. Back then you had to be a major industry player in order to infringe copyright at scale. You had to own things like printing presses. Now copying data is trivial. All software has access to a memcpy function. All you need to do to copy files is hold down Ctrl + V until your hard drive is completely filled with copies. It's trivial to send these copies to anyone over the internet or sneakernet.
Copyright is insane and utterly incompatible with the era of information and computers. I hope it's abolished within my lifetime.
> and if the tech can't be stopped without outlawing general purpose computing, they might outlaw general purpose computing before they admit defeat
This is a given in my opinion. The copyright battle is really a battle for computing freedom. It's our computers, if we want to copy data it's our choice and nobody cares about some made up copyright monopoly. The computer obeys us. The only way they can possibly enforce copyright is by making it so computers obey them instead. This will destroy free software and free computing as we know it today. I'd rather the entire copyright industry goes bankrupt than lose that.
It's not just copyright either. Governments the world over have an obvious interest in controlling computers because of cryptography. It used to be a military tool and because of computers it became democratized, widely available and used by every citizen. Cryptography can defeat governments, militaries, judges... It's subversive technology. They think it's too powerful for mere citizens to have access to.