We all know that SOPA is all about the money (I'll ignore the "everything is" argument, for now). Money the *IAAs feel they are losing, money the politicians have accepted in campaign contributions... Even the advertisements trying to drum up support for SOPA are about all the jobs (money) that will be lost if this doesn't become law...

Every argument I've heard has been about ideals and technology... We all know how politicians and corporations feel about ideals. Freedom of speech, Impossible to implement, Would break the very foundation of the web, etc... All meaningless to these people without a dollar sign attached to them.

This is the first argument I have heard that directly turns the tables. "Pass SOPA, and we will no longer trust any software produced by a US company." This would affect many more than just MS, Apple, and Google... How many PCs will Dell, (or HP, or Acer, or...) sell outside of the US if they are not allowed to sell them with (or without) Windows? If Dell et. al. are forced into producing computers with Windows installed for the US market, and %NotWindows% for the rest of the world, how long before they decide it isn't worth the effort, and just pick their favorite %NotWindows% for the entire line? How many jobs will be lost if no one in Europe is allowed to use Photoshop, MS Office, iTunes, AutoCAD,... The list goes on and on.

Do I think this is likely to happen? Not really.. But it makes for a good advertising campaign against SOPA.

You are thinking too small. To be truly effective, each of these sites should have a total blackout for one day. Coordinate, and choose one day that they actively refuse every connection made to any of their servers. 24 house for the entire world to see what it will be like to have no Google, no YouTube, No Gmail, no Facebook, No Zynga (kinda redundant with no Facebook, I know...) Heck, cut off all those useful Android utilities while you are at it.

24 hours worth of profits to most of these companies is chump change... 24 hours of profits lost by those other companies who rely on these services though would make a huge impact. One that could not be ignored.

While I have family on the outer banks in NC, and I wish everyone the best... I can't help but think that poor Irene doesn't have a chance of living up to the media coverage... The sad part isn't that the media has latched onto it and is hyping it to no end. (We're used to that, after all...) But that it really is a prime example of "The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf". Hype it up and it fails to meet expectations, and nobody will believe you next time... When it IS that bad.

To play devil's advocate here... Aren't these same "competitive mechanisms" the same arguments that are regularly cited as the reason open source software is better than closed source? Whoever makes the best product or implementation wins? The only difference being that it is somehow assumed that profit is never a motive for any open source project. (Easily proven false, but that is always the assumption...)

I agree that the article is in fact standard issue Forbes free market trolling.. but you should really come up with a better argument for it. OSS proves that competitive mechanisms don't always favor groups that cut costs, reduce quality or undercut "higher quality" competitors. Or at least that they don't HAVE to favor those things.

Spam is no longer profitable! Tell Everyone! Failure to forward this story to at least 15 people will result in... more spam! But if you add your name to the bottom of this story, and send one dollar to each person whose name appears above yours you will make millions! And have a larger penis too!

Amen to this whole thread!

I'm IT director for a TV station. I spend all day buying, installing, troubleshooting, configuring, fixing, and explaining everything from video servers to telephones... Most of the servers are Linux based (a couple of Windows thrown in to keep things interesting) Most of the desktops are Windows based (with a couple of Macs and one Linux system thrown in for good measure) and the phones.. don't get me started on that end of things!

When I go home.. I just want my stuff to work. I want it to connect to all the stuff AT work that DOESN'T work, and I want have to work on it as little as possible. Mac, OSX all the way.

And to put in my bit with the ongoing car analogy... Yes, it is always a good thing to know how stuff works, and how to fix it when it doesn't.. A little knowledge goes a long way. But when you want a reliable car, you go ask the mechanic what he drives. Sure, they might have a project car to tinker with (and brag about how much horsepower and how much over it is bored and how much torque and how many PSI of boost etc...) But Odds are the car they drive 90% of the time is the one they don't have to mess with constantly to keep running...

I work at a TV station... We're running 5 streams.. I put in about 45 hours/week.. At home, It's all boxee/netflix/DVD, so only add about 5 hours/week there.. gives me a rough guess total of...230 hours of TV/week...

I'd hope that puts me pretty well to the right of the bell curve...

Anyone else ever mess with the "Brainwave Syncronizer" In Cool Edit?

I suffer from occasional severe insomnia, and burning a full CD that gradually slowed the binaural beats down into the deep sleep stage was the ONLY non-narcotic solution to ever work.

Sad to realize all these years later, the only reason it worked is because it was my gateway to ambien...~

~Now if only all of us cancerous, diabetic, broken-hearted Downs' Syndrome laden humans would just stop breeding, we would be in great shape, right?~

I should be careful, it's snark like that that gets people thinking about eugenics...

I actually agree with you that it is not stealing... my bad, perhaps I should have put "steal" in"quotes"... Though my main point still stands. If copyrights were more reasonable, we wouldn't be having this argument in this big of an arena to begin with.

now.. can you prove God doesn't exist?

And despite the popular claim of the opposite, you can prove a negative, generally by proving a different paradoxical positive, but still...

For my actual thoughts on it... I think there is a balancing act to be had in it. If you work is good enough that enough people will buy it to make it a success, then enough people will be willing to pirate it to hurt sales also. One of the big reasons for the online "pirating" today isn't the ease of copying (though it contributes) it is that the balance on the opposite side (copyright) has grown too heavy.

With copyrights as long as they are now, there is very little content that CAN'T be pirated, by definition. With shorter copyrights, more content would be available unencumbered. If you knew that you could get it legally, for free in a couple of years, (wait for it to come out on DVD... Wait till it is out on TV... etc arguments) would you be in such a rush to steal it? Again, only if the work was "good enough" to warrant the risk. Even then, the risk would have to be seen as less than the costs of buying it legally.

Not really the whole answer, but enough for a /. post