Living in China, let me tell you what life is like with restricted internet

This is just a specific instance of the fact that banning something will just force it underground, make it harder to track, make acquisition become a gamble on authenticity/safety and create negative economic consequences.

In countries where easy download is not possible (either due to restrictions on access or third world lack of internet) the more amoral technologically advantaged start charging rent for access. All they have to do is download and charge something far less than the retail price. If SOPA does succeed in making online piracy harder, it creates an imbalance of power beyond just concentrating authoritarian levels of control in the hands of a few; it also opens up those whose priorities are not in tech to exploitation.

Money that could have been spent within the productive economy (not necessarily on the product) is now diverted to the hidden markets, possibly indirectly funding operations with more overhead. The fact that where access to internet is restricted, such as in third world countries, people are still willing to pay above zero but unwilling to pay at retail suggests a pricing mismatch and that there might be a set of conditions where people will pay at a profit. It also suggests the piracy problem will be compounded as it grows more heads, gets more complicated, gets driven underground and becomes more hazardous. Malware authors may be rubbing their hands in anticipation of writing movie downloading or subscription sites.

If I were to define a minimal basis for which people decide to torrent something its: [level of want, ease of legal access, relative cost of legal access, benefits of legal access, ease of pirating, cost of pirating, weighted odds of getting caught * cost of getting caught]. What SOPA is trying to do is make the cost of catching people illegally sharing super high. Except its not going to work because the infringers are not directly affected by the actual consequences. This is part of why it is hard to explain the consequences to a lay person.

What the producers need to focus on is to increase the ease and benefits of legal access and price reasonably. You can't effectively charge for information. But you can charge for information laced with convenience. People are risk avoiding and are even happy to buy things when they aren't treated worse than the actual infringers. For example, the ease and benefits from buying games on steam so completely dwarfs the ease of piracy that I prefer to not pirate a game even when I think the cost is too high because it is just not worth the hassle and I have experienced something better. I'd rather wait for a sale or prices to drop. I believe most people with a stable monetary situation would actually prefer to not "have" to pirate.

The argument of whether you are entitled to information you cannot access (e.g. tv shows in U.S. not appearing in Europe or overly expensive) is orthogonal and based on personal ethics. The practical reality is enough people will pirate if the conditions are right and there are those who weigh cost above all else - all the money "lost" to them could never have been gotten at a profit in the first place. Rather than whining and holding the internet hostage, the goal should be to maximize conversion and retention of those who can be reasonably swayed to buy while minimizing your costs as a business.

Is this a case of the big publishers committing something akin to the sunk cost fallacy?

1.) Youtube, Twitter, Facebook... blocked 2.) Google... rerouted to HK and still censored 3.) Gmail... increasingly unreliable 4.) Chinese mostly don't care, but only because of length of time that the situation has endured. China runs on 'Guanxi', or relationships. In other words, rampant nepotism and (sometimes) thinly veiled corruption. You start company Y competing with foreign company X. You get the government to block company X's service in China. Within a fairly short amount of time, your company's site dominates, and people mostly forget about the foreign competitor. 5.) Foreigners are generally not bothered when using VPNs (I have had excellent experience with one in particular, but avoid posting it publicly for obvious reasons). Assuming, of course, the use is apolitical. 6.) Young Chinese web users have developed conventions for speaking about sensitive topics in ways that (somewhat) evade censorship, such as using homophones, metaphors, etc. 7.) The general atmosphere in China, as regards the censorship, contains less animosity than most westerners would assume. Most web users understand that censors are just doing their job, and occasionally even speak to censors directly in their social network site posts, such as to make a plea to leave the post up for just a little bit longer before censoring it. 8.) In general people in China do desire change, but they're largely pragmatic about it. They've seen incredible progress in their lifetime, and though there are occasional steps backward that are frustrating, the overall march still tends to be in the right general direction (the nature of information - it naturally breeds freedom, bringing access to more information, and thus more freedom, in a virtuous cycle). Young Chinese people are often more informed about political issues than young westerners, through their prolific use of social networking sites (yes - even more than their counterparts in more developed nations).

Ah, back to the point... use a good VPN, and all will be well.

I hate SOPA too, but tying SOPA to the restrictions currently in China is absolutely inaccurate. SOPA's main objective (regardless of whether it'll actually do this) would be to attack pirating sites. In China, they don't really care about pirating. Even mid-sized companies and internet cafes use illegal software. When you ask if it's "real" you get a response that's something like "of course it's real, you can use it."

internet censorship is used for a completely different reason, and should not be compared.

Having spent a long time in China, I can see the dangers of the censorship enabled by SOPA. But I also know that, should the Party decide to eliminate piracy, they could do so. There's simply no incentive right now - it would be an unpopular policy that would largely benefit foreign firms.

I vaguely remember some list of banned Australian sites being leaked on Wikileaks, and some videos about abortion and really random sites being on that list. Do someone knows more?

I cannot speak on a case by case, but it's hard to argue against the idea that most Americans do not vote. We turn on the TV to CNN, Fox, MSNBC, or whatever you chose. We hear people debate on an issue with the majority in the small debate arguing in your viewpoint. All people do after that is yell at the TV saying "YHA!" then go to bed. We do not take action.

We let the law makers do their job, but when they don't do something we agree with we talk about how bad they are. Then the next big story comes the following week and we are then talking about that. We don't take a stand and speak with what law makers truly care about, our vote.

Law makers create these laws to get lobbiest dollars so that they can run for reelection. However, they wouldn't do these kinds of things if they knew that they won't get that end result, the vote which in turn gives a reelection. If they knew that the electorate within their district or state would put in the effort to research representative/senators then Congress wouldn't try to pass something like this.

The unfortunate truth is that our representative/senators are right. They know that we take little to know action. SOPA is an extremely rare case where the American people actually get up and get involved in government. I agree that SOPA must be stopped, but I also believe that SOPA would not even be here if the American people did their job in the first place and got involved. We can send our men and women around the world to let other nations have the right to vote, yet we can't walk across the street to do it ourselves.

The ironic thing is, the majority of people who do agree with what I say will say "YHA!" and continue surfing the web. Sorry if my thoughts are unorganized, but I am extremely tired and have a headache. I know I am missing a lot of issues I want to hit, but I can get to them in another comment :)

To understand this, you should first know that internet in China is a whole ecosystem of its own, pretty much like a giant intranet. For every website that's blocked by the government (Facebook, Twitter, etc) there's a Chinese alternative available, such as Renren and Sina Weibo. Everyone uses these alternative sites, and people don't really feel that their online experience is being restricted.

European and American people who go to China have a hard time adapting themselves though.

Less people raise this because more Western people want to access Western content from China than want to access Chinese content from the West, but it is another issue affecting free exchange of culture. It's also not as straightforward to get a VPN into China as it is to get one out of China. Not to mention that this annoys Chinese students studying abroad who want to watch TV from home.

Much more secure than assuming some corporation will value your data. Or that dropbox is secure in any way.

Irony apart. 100% of digital goods in China are pirated. That goes along a great way to show how effective internet censorship is for piracy.

On the other hand, most south American countries have free internet (as in speech) and 90% of video games there, even consoles, are pirated.

I'm going to put my money that income controls pirating better than anything else.