A better analogy is, "What if Tor spent an obscene amount of effort on creating books you were physically incapable of lending, of creating elaborate hardcovers that could only be opened if you had the original bookstore receipt, and wanted the government to do surprise inspections of every bookshelf and library in the country to be certain that everything was legally obtained?"

And the reason they do this is because book sales are lagging?



Actually, the publishing industry is an interesting analogy, because their piracy battle was over long ago. Or have the rise of libraries, photocopiers, and home printers destroyed books?


In any case, I think my reply to ironclad might serve as a good response to your post. It essentially says that the only effective way to mitigate (mitigate, not abolish, which is impossible in this age we live in) piracy is to make the stuff people want convenient and inexpensive to access.


(But really, piracy isn't the issue here- as we've said, SOPA will do very little to actually combat piracy. What SOPA will do will make it that a site can legally be taken down if a poster uses a picture of Mickey Mouse as their message board avatar.)