Reddit user compellingly explains what SOPA is really about, and how it might be stopped

[beer]

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by BobA841908

They're not trying to persuade the senators directly, they're trying to make the issues known to the general public. The average internet user likely hasn't even heard of SOPA, much less realize the implications it entails. On the other hand, hundreds of millions use sites such as google, yahoo, and twitter daily. If instead of their normal behavior, all of those people using those pages get a notice about SOPA, a quarter will likely read it at least once, and a quarter of those might actually understand why that's a bad thing, and a tenth of those might actually take the time to try to contact their representatives about it. You're looking at potentially millions of constituents, all trying to contact their senators within a couple hour time frame, the day before the issue goes to a vote.

The vast majority of politicians are in it to make money, not make the country a better place. That means accepting donations and favors, and staying in office as long as possible to accept more donations and favors. Argue that all you want, but the fact is that politicians don't get paid all that much, yet Senators all live very well, well beyond what a $175k/yr salary would suggest. If a particular bill becomes unpopular, they aren't going to support it and risk losing their position in the next election, regardless of how much lobbyists are otherwise pushing it.

A full blackout is a reasonable response, because, in the language that is so popular with politicians, SOPA is going to result in excessive regulation that will cost jobs and likely cause significant increases in the cost of services, perhaps to the point where those services will no longer be able to provided on an ad supported or free to consumer basis.

The only impediment is how to make this coordinated. For instance all the Google, Bing, and Yahoo are going to have cooperate. Otherwise any blackout may simply result in loss of customers for one service, not a clear message to call one's representative. I suspect that if the services choose a minute during the day when no results are returned, only a message to call your representative and state your opinion on SOPA, the bill will die. If Google and MS tell users that search will die if SOPA is passed, no amount of politicking will be able to counteract that message. Anything less is a show of support for SOPA by the major players.

You can't combat piracy. Externalities are a cost of doing business. Anyone who thinks otherwise is kidding him/herself.

There's exactly one way to maximize profit, and that is to deliver a product that people are willing to pay for at a price that they are willing to pay. The pirates were never your customers and never will be, and the sooner the companies accept that and focus on the real problems (massively overpricing everything when first released, delivering products that can't easily be moved between devices because of the restrictive/broken DRM, and the declining quality of entertainment products in general), they'll have better profits. That's not what SOPA/PIPA and similar legislation are about, however. They're about eliminating legitimate lower-cost competition.

What scares the industry most is that these days, any jackass in his home could make a movie of comparable quality to most of the non-SFX Hollywood films. Moderately high-end HD cams cost a couple of grand or three—well within the price range of most people if they are willing to save up for a bit. You can buy halogen lights at Home Depot for fifty bucks, then rebuild the reflectors yourself and build your own barn doors for just about nothing. And there are millions of people out there who can act, not just a few dozen in Hollyweird, so there's no shortage of available talent.

In effect, this means that commercial movies are too expensive by about a factor of a thousand. But instead of finding ways to take advantage of new technologies to cut their production and distribution costs, they are instead focusing on destroying new means of distribution to prevent competition. You see, YouTube is in a great position to deliver paid content from independent producers to consumers. The studios know this, and they know that if the Internet turns into anything approaching a free market, they're basically out of business. For this reason, they do everything within their power to kill such sites—not because they can be used to pirate Hollywood movies, but because they can be used to sell non-Hollywood movies without having to spend millions of dollars in infrastructure. That ability of the general public to do what the major studios do is the greatest threat to their power.

Game studios are similar. There's no reason why people who want to write games should go work for one of those sweatshops, working unholy hours for terrible pay. You can go off on your own and work with a handful of people and write a great game, sell it, and make a fair amount of money. If everyone did this, the sweatshop game studios of the world would collapse, and the Internet makes that not only possible, but downright easy. They know this, and it terrifies them. So they do what they can to create liability for any ISP that might dare to distribute software, thus discouraging the practice.

And so on. It's not about piracy. It's about control. They want to control the entire content production industry, and our Congresspeople are almost all too fucking stupid to realize that these laws only serve to turn the big studios into a state-protected oligopoly and thwart small businesses' attempts to compete. And this is why we don't have jobs in this country.

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I thought this is the best SOPA writeup to date.

:cheers: