SonOfVoorhees said:
Why did the internet turn into cry babies over a bill that was never, ever going to go through. Its hilarious. I agree that companies should have control and ban sites that are pirating and distributing their property illegally. But the bill needs to be more specificly targetted at the criminals, not just because a film fan writes about a movie he liked and adds a trailer to it without asking permission.
End of the day the internet can not be controlled, its to big. An there are people with skills that enable them to get around any anti pirating bill that is put into effect. The fact is some people want stuff for free and that will never change.
If you'd checked the number of House reps who were in favor of SOPA only a week ago, you'd be singing a different tune. The bill very much could have gone through, simply because of lobbyists. As for the companies having control, no. Absolutely not.
Imagine for a second that the majors indeed do have control over legislation. YouTube dies. Social networks die. Lyrics depositories die. Why? All because someone took offense of the fact that Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" is used without consent of the copyright holders.
They won't make any difference between harmless fanfic authors putting a trailer together for their works or the aXXo ripping group. They won't make any difference between Let's Play providers and scene groups offering game rips.
There is no way whatsoever to ensure that the quote-unquote "right" people are prosecuted. Piracy cannot and will never be handled in a successful manner, because the very structure of the Internet makes any and all attempts at a national form of legislation unfair to whoever lives or works outside of those national laws. The current situation is allowing for cases where a citizen of Great Britain who is innocent by British law to be prosecuted according to American laws without any kind of local proofs backing up his arrest.
The only way we could conceivably legislate the Internet is if we considered it to be a supra-national entity with its own government and structure - a virtual country, if you will. If the Internet developed its own laws from within, then all users across the globe could successfully be held accountable for their actions. Expecting everyone to be free and able to just rush in guns blazing is only going to turn the World Wide Web into an anarchist hotbed - if it hasn't already. This would mean that the more hard-lining governments would have to put some serious water in their wine (e.g. China), as we couldn't have one "province" of the Web enforcing censorship while others don't.
That is, at the very least, how I see things. I'm not a lawyer and I have no idea how this would work, but it feels like a somewhat workable solution in my admittedly naive mindset.
