Scribd Protests SOPA By Making A Billion Pages On The Web Disappear

The entertainment business hasn't ceased to exist despite a decade of internet piracy -- and in fact seems to be doing quite well. Both of your examples, Adele and HBO (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/04/business/media/time-warner...) are doing great -- so I wouldn't hold them up as examples of the plight of the entertainment industry.

So, I'd ask you instead, how can you show that our existing laws that protect rights holders aren't adequate.

That said, I utterly disagree that the US has any obligation to protect the "intellectual property" of any group. The music industry has stolen and stolen and stolen from musicians for years and having vast influence now, they want the right to steal services from anyone else based on any possibility, any whiff, that their government-granted-monopoly might be infringed on.

As others have pointed, the era of the fall the music industry gate keepers has been good to musicians.

If the US government is our government (big if there), it does not have the obligation to make its main priority private policing for a variety of falling monopolists. In other words, I don't have an answer to your final question but my comment is "this is not my problem, it is their problem and our response should be to throw it back to them".

The MPAA lost and the VCR stayed in the market; phenomenally increasing MPAA member revenue because apparently, potential is a two way street.

The IP-based industries see new potentials (eg, the internet), get FUD'd up by the potential abuse, refuse to be creative enough to see the potential revenue, and then go into Destroy-Everything mode.

The stupidity runs deep. They seek legislative blockage due to their thorough inability to be compatible with emerging patterns of consumption.

> If you are Adele, ... don't you think you'd like to DNS blackhole...

Well, no. I'd like to see what removing all pirated works and making it much more of a pain the ass to get my IP actually does for sales vs. leaving them out and possibly garnering the goodwill and increased exposure. But then, I'm a numbers guy and not an entertainer.

I've read about studies that say piracy is good, and a lot that show how little piracy or the lack of it actually effects the artists (vs. the industry whoring them out); maybe there's some sort of laffer curve effect there, or maybe the studies are all bullshit too. I don't have any good answers either, but I know what I'd try. And maybe I'd get real broke, real fast too. <Shrug>

I'm not advocating for 100% direct democracy. I'm just saying there is a scale, and we need to push that scale back a little more towards direct democracy, because right now it's too easy for politicians to do whatever they want when in Office when the only repercussion is not being re-elected (maybe). Getting a lot of funding for the 2nd campaign can help negate that "punishment" too sometimes.

The recent history of the US government shows a frightening trend toward giving itself more power. And power to control information is always especially coveted.

SOPA was/is bought and paid for for a clearly tiny minority of interests. The civil rights laws emerged as a result of a contentious political process spurred on by protests and resistance by a sizable part of the population. It was certainly democratically motivated --- just not in the sense of counting heads.

SOPA has nothing to do with democracy at all. It's about corporations protecting their interests. This happens all the time, of course, but to say that democracy should be thrown out the window because, well, sometimes you just have to "do the right thing" is garbage.