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To those that say it's censoring the internet, nonsense. Since when is stopping cybercrime censorship? It's about protecting people's rights to their work.

...should be protected from pirating...

The other issue is that we shouldn't use legislation to protect a dying business model**. This only stifles innovation. It's possible to make plenty of revenue, even if copyright infringement is as prevalent as is claimed. Steam, Amazon MP3, and iTunes are massively profitable.

This is impossible.

To those that say it's censoring the internet, nonsense. Since when is stopping cybercrime censorship?

This is impossible.

Well... not "give up" impossible. "Seal airtight" is certainly impossible, but the point is really just to keep profit margins up, so the efforts do actually have good results in this regard... if the programmers and social engineers are clever enough in the design of the product.

SOPA is more a of "Og get bigger hammer" solution.

That doesn't mean that proper precautions developed by people that understand what they're doing (not politicians, IMO), shouldn't be developed. There will always be criminals, but that doesn't mean that ways to hinder them shouldn't be implemented.

Neither SOPA nor PIPA, or, for that matter, DMCA fall into this category. DMCA is far better than the former, and even it is more harmful than good. Off the top of my head, one prominent example is it's use by companies to prevent security researchers from presenting their results at conferences.

Rather than use the nuclear option, it's far better to give incentives not to pirate. (And being shot at down does not count as an incentive, MPAA/RIAA. ) Like I said before, iTunes and Steam are great examples of this.

Ultimately, what we have is a battle between the content industry and tech/internet companies over what the future of content distribution is.

Agreed. You can make it hard for the average person to pirate something, but as long as debuggers are legal and there are people skilled at disassembly it can be done.

This is not something that will be solved by politics, which is something I'm glad to see the Whitehouse seems to understand. Finally common sense seems to be prevailing.

By 1996, it became clear to everyone in the halls of power that there was something important about to happen. We were about to have an information economy, whatever the Hell that was. They assumed it meant an economy where we bought and sold information. Information technology improves efficiency, so imagine the markets that an information economy would have! You could buy a book for a day, you could sell the right to watch the movie for a Euro, and then you could rent out the pause button for a penny per second. You could sell movies for one price in one country, at another price in another, and so on. The fantasies of those days were like a boring science fiction adaptation of the Old Testament Book of Numbers, a tedious enumeration of every permutation of things people do with information—and what might be charged for each.

Unfortunately for them, none of this would be possible unless they could control how people use their computers and the files we transfer to them. After all, it was easy to talk about selling someone a tune to download to their MP3 player, but not so easy to talk about the the right to move music from the player to another device. But how the Hell could you stop that once you'd given them the file? In order to do so, you needed to figure out how to stop computers from running certain programs and inspecting certain files and processes. For example, you could encrypt the file, and then require the user to run a program that only unlocked the file under certain circumstances.

But, as they say on the Internet, now you have two problems.

You must now also stop the user from saving the file while it's unencrypted—which must happen eventually— and you must stop the user from figuring out where the unlocking program stores its keys, enabling them to permanently decrypt the media and ditch the stupid player app entirely.

Now you have three problems: you must stop the users who figure out how to decrypt from sharing it with other users. Now you've got four problems, because you must stop the users who figure out how to extract secrets from unlocking programs from telling other users how to do it too. And now you've got five problems, because you must stop users who figure out how to extract these secrets from telling other users what the secrets were!

That's a lot of problems. But by 1996, we had a solution. We had the WIPO Copyright Treaty, passed by the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization. This created laws that made it illegal to extract secrets from unlocking programs, and it created laws that made it illegal to extract media (such as songs and movies) from the unlocking programs while they were running. It created laws that made it illegal to tell people how to extract secrets from unlocking programs, and it created laws that made it illegal to host copyrighted works or the secrets. It also established a handy streamlined process that let you remove stuff from the Internet without having to screw around with lawyers, and judges, and all that crap.

And with that, illegal copying ended forever, the information economy blossomed into a beautiful flower that brought prosperity to the whole wide world; as they say on the aircraft carriers, “Mission Accomplished".

To those that say it's censoring the internet, nonsense.

Nonsense. It's depriving the owner of the sale of his product.

It is not going to work unless they'll reduce the whole Internet to 1984-ish security and censorship and everyone knows it.

Protecting property rights, even if it's an ill conceived bill by politicians that don't understand, is not censorship.

Protecting property rights, even if it's an ill conceived bill by politicians that don't understand, is not censorship.

Protecting property rights, even if it's an ill conceived bill by politicians that don't understand, is not censorship.