Even if SOPA doesn't pass, what really worries me is that the perpetrators have bottomless pockets and lots of time. They'll doubtlessly keep ramming similar bills into congress until either the politicians decide they've received enough campaign contributions, or the public's minuscule attention span drifts elsewhere.
The state of our political and social climate plus the fact that this bill has gotten as far as it has makes me think that censorship will be inevitable. The only way we can get around this is to build a truly distributed internet, one without a backbone or single point of control. Can we do it?
Well you can go on the attack and create laws that they will be busy lobbying against, reduce their power, etc. The tech industry doesn't seem to go on the offensive with this kind of stuff, probably because they find it distasteful, while *IAA doesn't.
What the BSA and Pfizer want can be separated out of the SOPA bill and it wouldn't effect the tech industry much at all as far as I understand. Some smart lobbyist combined the two categorical interests to increase it's likelihood of passing.
What I mean by reduce their power, are new laws that reverse some of the victories that they've had previously and create new freedoms that would hurt their bottom line and help everyone else's.
No, you will need some societal inflection point to leverage. 9/11 is one such point, and OWS seems to be building upto another one.
This is another reason to support OWS - they are actively moving the overton window [1] back towards sanity while Wall Street and their "elected" cronies in office are doing the opposite... the extreme left wing / anarchist crazies serve a purpose.
You can't always solve political problems with technical solutions. A truly distributed internet could be considered a mechanism to bypass IP protection laws, and made illegal. I think the best that can be done under the circumstances is to keep broadcasting the message that the DMCA is more than enough.
The state of our political and social climate plus the fact that this bill has gotten as far as it has makes me think that censorship will be inevitable. The only way we can get around this is to build a truly distributed internet, one without a backbone or single point of control. Can we do it?