[citation][nom]amk-aka-Phantom[/nom]This is America. They're only "democratic" on TV. Everything else is governed by money. People want one thing, corporations want another? Screw the people.[/citation]
Of course, the people (outside of the tech-heads on sites like these) are totally unaware of SOPA, Protect-IP and whatever the third one was (basically Protect-IP-lite). The cable news outlets haven't mentioned a thing about it and I doubt they will because it'll cut into their coverage of the Kardashians and holiday shopping trends (of course, their parent companies are some of the lobbyists that are pushing for SOPA).
This whole thing angers me to no end. The idiot senators and representatives are buying the argument from RIAA and MPAA that piracy is destroying their dinosaur business model, which is what they say every time a new tech comes out. They complained the home VHS recorder was going to destroy the film industry, they complained recording radio using a cassette recorder was going to destroy the music industry, they complained the mp3 was going to destroy the music industry, and so on and so on. Not a single one of those things ever did anything other than just change how the industry functioned and, in most cases, made far more lucrative markets than the old model.
I think Gabe explained it best when he stated piracy was a service related problem and not a cost one. Most of the people I know that used to be 'active' pirates have long since abandoned their illegal downloading now that services such as Netflix, Steam, Amazon, iTunes, etc. have made it that there's very little reason to pirate anymore (other than unavailability or just being total cheapskates). There's little reason to set up an overnight (or few night) download (and hope the seeds don't drop out) of a movie when you can just instant stream it from Netflix/Amazon for a buck or two, (similarly why bother stealing music when you can likely get it from iTunes for 0.99 or just listen to Pandora/last.fm). Pirating software and fiddling with cracks/hacks/potential viruses/clicking 3 banners to get a password for the tar.gz/etc just seems like an unnecessary headache when you can get it off Steam, D2D, or whatever very easily (and for ridiculous discounts if you're willing to wait for a sale).