It is called "incrementalism," and is how industry lobbies work. The best example I have heard was a former TX legislator talking about a trucking lobby bill to extend their trailers legal length by 25 feet. They lost a lopsided vote on it, so they came back with a bill extending the limit 5 feet, which passed. They quietly passed duplicate bills in each of the next four legislative sessions, and had their 25 foot extension by the end of the decade.

Anyone expecting Obama to play white knight on SO/PIPA has paid too much attention to his rhetoric and too little to the bills he signed. If push comes to shove expect Obama to enact SO/PIPA with a big speech explaining how they actually liberate internet users and prevent media industry abuses. Even if that were not true, sending him a bill would not let him pay his debts, but neutralize the issue for the campaign (not that it will be a campaign issue in any case; rightly or not, most voters consider online civil liberties a much lower priority than jobs, the federal debt, health care, national security, REAL civil liberties and what color to paint Congress.)

It might be more politically expedient to wait until January, but the difference is probably marginal and I expect round two this summer, if not after Easter. In terms of Obamas dubious veto promise, Republicans would be better off if he paid his debt now so a predominantly liberal demographic believes the issue settled and has less reason to show up on election day.

Best settle in for the long haul; I guarantee Big Media has, and is counting on the inability to sustain opposition while they bide their time and pay their Congressmen.


As you say, "it's possessing the knowledge to acquire" data illegally, and that possession is enabled by pirate sites providing the knowledge. It ought to be trivial to make providing the knowledge illegal, but unfortunately it is not, because of people who think teaching people how to commit crimes or providing the means of doing so is protected speech. "I did not do anything wrong; all I did was post people bank account numbers online with instruction on how to empty them and/or a convenient link that does it automatically." Think that would hold up in court...?

The only justice is many of the people insisting that is protected speech have their identity and/or life savings stolen by those they defend, because the last game/movie/song they illegally downloaded had spyware that carefully logged and transmitted the data every time they paid a bill or checked their balance online.


I am sure it was not easy to make a case UNDER EXISTING LAW against Megaupload, even though they were clearly profiting from illegally providing other peoples intellectual property. That it was happening in another country surely complicated matters as well. Those reasons are why the industry is pushing for new laws to facilitate protecting their rights against indisputable infringement. That it is a matter of one persons right to swing their arm ending where it intersects anothers nose is what makes this issue so contentious, but it is as counterproductive and untrue for netizens to insist media executives HAVE no rights as it is for the latter to insist the same about the former. As long as the issue is decided on those terms, I assure you the money will win in the end.

As far as the international perception of American justice, let us not go crazy here. Yes, nations WITHOUT CAPITAL PUNISHMENT are notoriously unwilling to extradite people to the US when they might face the death penalty, but that is obviously a non-issue for data piracy. The kind of people who would refuse to extradite a data pirate because they consider the US legal system unjust are not making that decision, because they consider their OWN (and every) legal system unjust. America has real flaws requiring correction, but I do not want to get off on a rant about people who think China and Iran more credible on civil liberties and non-aggression. It is a self correcting problem; America is running out of cash and starting to remember it had to be dragged kicking and screaming into winning those two world wars. One of these days the rest of the world will turn to its much maligned savior to rescue it from a dictator and be told it is not our problem.


Which last is probably as it should be; no harm, no foul and all that.

No one is forced to USE the technology, but anyone using it IS forced to upload data as they download it. Yes, it was very clever for criminals to find a way to commit crimes that makes the commission far more difficult to detect while simultaneously making so many other culpable that prosecuting all of them is impractical. However, if a thief figured out a way to get every bank customer to steal one dollar, often witout even knowing it, and then bring it to him it would still be very clear who ultimately bore ALL responsibility. It would be harder to detect and thus prove, but all the more vital for that, because devious thieves are far more harmful than stupid ones.


It may not be so high volume for individual files, but under the format you describe it would not take long to compile a list of "usual suspects," thereby providing probable cause to surveill them and obtain proof of crimes. Basically, the same way US cops use inexplicably high electricity usage as justification to take infrared photos of people growing pot in their homes, then bust them.


The meteoric growth of legal commerical bandwidth use makes it unlikely there will be any kind of laws against providing unlimited usage. A minimal tax might develop, but as web access becomes more ubiquitous I would expect resistance to that in the US, because of the difference between how the US views usage of "public" airwaves relative to how other countries view it. Cable and ISPs may be changing that, but in the old days access FROM public airwaves was free to the public who owned them; the only fees were on broadcasters publicly licensed access TO public airwaves. Both "public service announcements" and many public affirs programs are a legacy of licensing requirements that broadcasters operate "in the public interest."

Unlimited access is not the real problem, but specific uses of it. It is VITAL to maintain that focus, and the push for SO/PIPA has sacrificed much of it: The goal must be to reduce or eliminate piracy rather than everything that CAN be used for piracy, but is often used for myriad legitimate purposes also. We did not shut down chat rooms when we discovered pedophiles trolling them for victims, or declare everyone who has ever been in a chat room pedophiles, because those would have been unnecessarily extreme overreactions. We do, however, monitor online chat far more aggressively now, and prosecute people we DO catch using it for sexual predation. We can make it illegal to run someone over with a car, and severely prosecute those who do, without banning cars or branding all drivers criminals.


Now that IS semantics. What difference does it make whether I state this sentence orally, on paper or electronically? You have a physical record of it in the second two cases; that is about it. Whether people communicate online or otherwise, they still communicate; peer-to-peer may be such a passive form many are not even aware of it, but it is still happening. Personally, I suspect telling people downloading software illegally that they are simultaneously broadcasting data from their computer to dozens or even hundreds of other people downloading software would NOT be a selling point. Widespread knowledge of that would probably go a long way toward diminishing peer-to-peer piracy by itself, because of the potential for abuse. Without knowing computers VERY well, when downloading software from a third party automatically means simultaneously uploading data to many other third parties, how does one know WHAT the Hell they are broadcasting? My own experience has been that vulnerability is about as much a deterrent to piracy as ethics and law are. Online piracy is the ultimate example of "let the non-buyer beware...."


Which is probably as it should be, really. I have a hard time believing large scale peer-to-peer piracy will be a long term issue, if only because it significantly increases the always significant vulnerability inherent in piracy. People who suffer losses due to USING peer-to-peer software have no more recourse than people whose computers are infected with viruses when they illegally download data from a pirate site. Again, calling the cops when ones dope is stolen is simply not an option.

In terms of enforcing anti-piracy laws, the trick seems to lie in detection, but the most egregious offenders are both the most detectable and the only significant part of the problem. Someone who downloads a single mp3 file every three or four months will be hard to catch, because they have very little illegally available data for others to obtain through a peer-to-peer connection, and in many cases do not use peer-to-peer often, legally or otherwise. However, people like that cost Big Media and its artists very little money, so if small fish slip through the net, so what? On the other hand, someone illegally downloading dozens or hundreds of games/songs/films a week, and simultaneously uploading pieces of them to thousand or tens of thousands of others will light up like a Christmas tree to any online surveillance. When busted, reading the charges against them will probably take longer than the rest of the trial. It is unsurprising that Big Media wants people like that to do hard time since putting a lein on their dorm rooms is impossible, and it is probably also justified.


Maybe that is a good thing, for the above stated reasons. In that kind of peer-to-peer format, the "occasional pirate" is unlikely to face any consequences except malware from dubious characters they should have avoided, but the "habitual pirate" has become very much part of the problem whether or not they realize it. They are broadcasting illegally obtained data over the internet just as surely as a Megaupload or Napster was, and it remains ludicrous to think all or even most people who can pay for legal copies of that content will turn down the opporunity for illegally obtain it for free. There is a reason everyone from banks to convenience stores keeps their money in safes, and cops work full time.


Do not sell the conspiracy theory short. Increasingly integrated multimedia has been converging on a single online source for at least a decade (arguably longer; the Big Bopper coined the phrase "music video" while still a DJ, even before his own musical career began in the late '50s.) Big Media accurately perceives both a threat and an opportunity in that. If the internet has enabled a whole new realm of independent individual content providers, it is much easier to control the profits and content of a single integrated medium than maintain a grip over distinct print, radio, film and network plus cable television media. The latest round in the ongoing online piracy battle is as much about free access to legitimate data as about free distribution of it.

The (so far...) successful opposition to SO/PIPA owes a large debt to an unexpected source: Constituents who have complained for years about "media bias" alarm congressional Republicans far more than Obama does. Those constituent concerns are quite valid reasons to oppose SO/PIPAs overly broad/intrusive aspects. Make no mistake though, while SO/PIPA are promoted as protecting Big Medias livelihood, and do so, the SUM of the bills also involves expanding and exploiting that livelihood. That is one more reason the argument is far from over and the public must protect its own interests by stating its own expectations of the inevitable new legislation. Ceding the framing of all new bills to Big Media (as insisting on NO bill does) is tantamount to surrendering the whole issue.

So the best bet is to state specifically what measures we DO support (while US Congressmen have little obligation to act on the suggestions of Canadians, they have no reason to utterly ignore valid informed ones either.) If 90% of what Congress hears is "we want x and y but not z," they can do the electoral math well enough to know that is what they better enact. If all they hear is a bunch of internet junkies insisting "the First Amendment gives us the right to do whatever we please, fascist111" they will ignore it as they always do that kind of alarmist fringe rant, and would even without hundreds of millions in Big Media money encouraging it.


Until/unless foreign media industries and/or the State Dept. succeed in getting the industrialized world to pass its own versions of SO/PIPA to provide for international enforcement and extradition, as they did with the DMCA. That will, of course, be the next step, after which pirate sites will be reduced to relying on whatever ad revenue they can get from advertisers in the country who built the REAL Great Firewall. Which ain't much.

Generally though, yes, including advertisers would scare them away from sponsoring pirate sites, where the laws applied, and would have a great effect even if that were only America (which it would not be for long.) For all the doom and gloom about Americas imminent demise, about 25% of all money on the planet still resides in the US; cutting off that revenue stream would have a devastating impact on anyone. Adding Western Europe and Japan would make things very difficult for pirate sites, particularly since their are about as many online advertisers in Botswana as there are people illegally downloading Mass Effect to their laptops.


In that case, I would say it is more that the people using it have "the wrong terminology," because that is not "peer to peer," but peer to peerS. Referring to it that way would be more accurate, but diminish the perception online piracy is just a couple college kids illegally sharing data with a couple others. As it should.


In terms of monitoring, therefore detection and therefore prosecution, that is ideal, because the most popular piracy is also the most easily detected and harmful. A lot of half century old media is no longer copyrighted anyway, because renewing copyrights cost money people are unwilling to spend protecting things they only sell a dozen copies of per year. The main thing provoking Big Media is that piracy at or even before initial release cuts into the most lucrative phase of sales, when demand is highest and supply is (or was) lowest.

How much does many people downloading snippets of data from a user downloading whole files from others slow the middlemans other operations though? A few hours may not be long to download a feature film, but how much does it eat into other performance if it means not only getting information from but suppplying it TO hundreds of other computers? Maybe it is negligible, but it should not be difficult to track and curtail; the limitation is more legal than technical, yes?


Ultimately, it is not even control over the internet itself so much as control over speech and communication in general. A theater group staging The Kings Speech and charging admission would probably find itself in the same legal jeopardy as people broadcasting it online. Much online behavior affirmed as "free speech" is not really free speech, but a form of unprotected and criminal speech either impossible or very difficult in other environments. The difference is if I got sued for selling Chewie/Jar-Jar slashfic at my local comic shop no netizens would leap to my defence (for many reasons.... )

The anarchist developers will not take the lead in internet architecture regardless, because, even online, architecture is still very much a brick and mortar phenomenon. Without a physical interface and physical network through which to send and receive data any and all innovative new software and techniquess are useless. Even WiFi does not ultimately change that; we still need modems, routers and servers. Even if we did not, we would still be using public airwaves, and if those are publicly owned, the publics government regulates them closely. Thanks to the unity of electricity and magnetism, every electrical device sold in the US requires FCC approval, if only to ensure it does not interfere with OTHER devices.

Software pirates have about as much chance against that as pirate radio did; calling it fascism does not MAKE it fascism, and to the extent the general public reacts at all it is with mild annoyance—and not at GOVERNMENT. The blowback against SO/PIPA is because they would affect a lot of people who are not pirates; piracy itself is a large but NOT widespread problem to which the general public is unsympathetic. Opponents got a natural but unexpected (by Republicans) boost from the same far right fringe that considers media itself a tyrannical liberal conspiracy, but a revision restricting new laws to what most of those people consider college punks who think themselves above the law that groundswell will collapse. Rush Limbaugh may enjoy bashing Obama, but that reason alone will convince him to support a bill Obama rhetorically opposes. The realization it only restricts access to the same liberal media propaganda he loathes is just icing on the cake, but we can hardly expect Pat Robertson to stand up for the right to free high quality hentai.


It leaves the avenue of going after providers also, to whom very little of the public is sympathetic. That peer-to-peers software makes every user a provider makes it much easier, because now we are no longer dealing with a single person grabbing a free movie or game off the net, but multiple people broadcasting it to EVERYONE. What seemed a clever way to avoid detection and liability is in fact just an unfortunate way to encourage more aggressive detection that eliminates downloaders ability to claim they are not hurting anyone.

It may not be plausible to say publishers lost revenue because Joe Blow would have bought each of the albums he illegally downloaded had he been unable to get them for free, but it is quite plausible to say at least one of the dozens or hundreds of people to whom he distributed it in the process would have. The dual nature of peer-to-peers software just makes people illegally downloading copyrighted material every bit as culpable as all the (other) people distributing it. Technically, it may have been a great benefit; LEGALLY, it could prove Armageddon, because the only people sympathetic to people illegally providing copyrighted data are the people receiving it. There are clearly a lot of them in the US, but there are 310 million Americans: Piracy is still a very unpopular act with a large effect because if even 1% of the population is doing it that is 3 million people, many of whom are engaged in a LOT of piracy.


"In that time frame"? It was five months ago; Americans are willing to give up about as much now as they were then. Americans are a funny lot, and one example of that is that we will bitch about people overcharging for their product in one breath and defend to the death their right to do so in the next. No one who dislikes the price of the product is obligated to pay it—they are just not entitled to receive the product unless they do.

3D is not just a gimmick to raise the price of theater tickets, it is a gimmick to put butts in the seats by offering something most people cannot (yet) get in front of monitors. Just like all the luxury seating (and good luck with that, Hollywood; I have yet to find a public environment with hundreds of people I found as comfortable as lying in bed naked and belching. ) It is the same reason they started offering "bonus scenes" on DVDs. For that matter, compare album covers before 1960 to those after home recording devices became really widespread, let alone covers from the '70s when cassettes arrived. Media publishers do not hire people to make that stuff for the sake of high art, it is an attempt to make impossible to duplicate anti-counterfeiting holograms into a marketing tool. Sure, you can download Dark Side, but no iconic prism for you (though you are welcome and encouraged to buy T-shirts with licensed reproductions®© at a retailer near you) and downloading Pulse will not get you a blinking LED in your CD rack (probably the first album ever sold that required batteries. )

That is how they are trying to offer people things pirates cannot, which is kind of sad considering it would probably be cheaper to just open a film studio owned version of iTunes. In an increasingly multimedia world, however, publishers will have to offer more and more multimedia content, which leads inevitably back to computers as the best format for that content and the internet as the best true MEDIUM of disseminating it. So, yeah, the expansive sweep of SO/PIPA are at least as much about getting a handle on that as getting one on piracy, and the public definitely needs to assert its voice in that regard lest the legitimate goal of fighting piracy be made a Trojan horse for a far more unsavory goal. If content can be removed and sites disabled on simply an unspecified allegation of copyright infringement, where does that leave independent/self publishers of wholly original work? They must prove their creations are not in any way derived from already copyrighted work, and the only thing harder than proving a negative is proving an undefined one.


Allied governments have been pretty cooperative on international anti-terrorist efforts, they just have not always been terribly public about it. One can hardly blame them; not only does that alert terrorists of what actions are being taken against them, but it invites shrieks from civil liberties watch dogs whether or not they are justified. Yet it has still been fairly successful, and in many places the mechanisms were already in place; even before 911 you would have had a hard time walking down a British street without being recorded by a government camera.

Yet, setting aside how much media demand is within the US and countries that view the matter as America does, I do not think a majority, or even sizable minority, of any industrialized country supports piracy. The backlash against SO/PIPA is not defence of piracy or the means exclusively or even mostly employed by it. It is mostly from people who firmly oppose piracy and support laws further reducing it and prosecuting violators, but do not want to be swept up for perfectly legitimate activities as a result, or lose access to perfectly legitimate sites. That is not a change that must be made, it is a status quo that will not change, and should not; the worst thing SO/PIPAs opponents could do for their cause is let Congress identify them with the pirates the new laws rightly target (and most opponents know that very well.)


Sure there are protocols: Because the pawn shops developed them, mostly in conjunction with law enforcement. They did NOT say, "no, it is up to Sears to ensure the TV we bought from some guy who walked in and showed us a fake ID is not stolen; it is not OUR fault if someone else came in and bought it for a tenth what it was worth because they knew it was stolen." Well, maybe some said that, but they said it while cops were slapping cuffs on them. In every other arena the onus is on the provider and obtainer to verify they are not getting property from Jimmy the Fence, but for some reason it is the owners responsibility to protect their own intellectual property? But only online; if someone prints a hundred thousand copies of The Eye of the World and sells them out of their car for $5 each they can be prosecuted, but if they "only" post it online, well, Tor and Jordan should have made it easier and cheaper to obtain legally.

Yes, the laws are lagging behind the decade or so old technology; yes, the laws will catch up, and soon. The smart thing is to ensure the new laws are not as brazenly and disastrously abused as the technology has been.


Yes, SO/PIPA wrongly create an assumption of guilt rather than innocence, and yes, that goes way too far. The DMCA safe harbor provision is just and vital, and preserving it is an obvious necessity in any anti-piracy law; we do not need or want an internet Star Chamber. Yet censoring content that is illegal within a country is not self-policing that requires no new laws, it is simply complying with existing law. Continuing the pawn shop analogy, obviously a retailer cannot wander into one randomly and say, "you are selling something, I will not say what, stolen from me," and have them arrested. BUT if they come in and say, "this TV with manufacturers serial #8073223432AIC is listed on the shipment manifest from my last delivery, but we reported it stolen because it was not on the truck," that is a different matter. At that point the item is seized as stolen property, and if it is proven the pawn broker KNEW it was stolen when they bought it, they will be charged with knowingly receiving stolen goods, primarily because THEY DID.


Take down requests with the force of orders have not put anyone out of business, and nothing more would be required. SO/PIPA rightly go much too far beyond that, and more responsible laws are needed, but the only route to those laws is for users to state specifically what is and is not needed. A need exists, and Big Media is clearly no more concerned with going too far than anyone would expect. Google cannot be expected to monitor every character typed on user blogs, but can be expected to remove every character proven to infringe copyright, and remove those accused of such infringement until/unless the accuser(s) fail to prove it. In fact, I am pretty sure Google et al. are QUITE clear users have no right to violate the law on their blogs.


So we track down the people running the blog, and until then require links to them be removed when detected. If people operating them move around so fast government cannot find their sites, individuals seeking pirated data will have no better luck, and that solves the problem. Meanwhile, "tracking and banning" involves more than simply banning, or it would be much harder for cops pursuing pedophiles in online chatrooms to arrest them. Obviously it is a little more difficult with people in foreign countries, unless there is an extradition treaty, but search engines can still be notified to remove the links. Comparing that to the Great Firewall does SO/PIPA opponents no good with Congress, and much harm. Congress will pay no attention to anyone who does not distinguish between requiring search engines to remove links to proven pirate sites and dragging political dissidents from their homes to prison labor camps in the dead of night. Nor should they.


The ultimate solution there is to deny countries lacking western business standards membership in untariffed "free" trade organizations, sanction them or slap them with a total embargo we punish businesses and individuals for breaking. The lesson of the Great Firewall is not "Americans must be eternally vigilant in protecting their 'right' to free mp3s," but that treating countries lacking our trade standards as equal trade partners means we will soon lack them also. There is something deeply twisted and deeply wrong about saying:

1) A $200 tariff, or any tariff, on an imported Chinese TV is an unfair trade practice,

2) Western companies forced to pay their TV makers minimum wage while Chinese companies can pay them with not shooting them IS fair trade and

3) Chinese companies selling copies of stolen copies of DVDs is unfair trade.

Those arguments are especially bizarre and contradictory, not to mention incredibly self-serving, when they are ALL coming from Sony.

That is a much bigger issue than SO/PIPA, or piracy in general, and the simple, practical and ethical solution is to make untariffed trade treaties conditional on fair trade. Countries that will not sign piracy extradition treaties—and a great many other treaties adopting standards on labor, consumer and environmental standards—are subject to commercial penalties for that, up to and including embargo. If retaliatory punitive tariffs are valid for violating provisions of the WTO and other treaties, we need only revise those treaties to include the standards required of businesses within other Western countries. That covers piracy, but a great deal more than that, too, and what infuriates me most about this debate is Big Medias zeal for profiting from all the other blessings of anarchy they enjoy in China (among others) while demanding the SINGLE aspect of US law benefiting them be enforced. Again, I liken it to a pimp calling the cops because the crackwhore he beat up stole his watch.


Well, in the US, if law enforcement, especially federal, wants ISP data access to pursue a criminal investigation, the ISPs have little latitude. That whole "licensed to use publicly owned airwaves in the public interest" thing again. Look at what happened when the feds wanted to tap cell phones or examine call history without a FISA warrant (even though the whole reason FISA exists is to require a warrant first.) All but one of the major cell phone carriers volunteered the desired data as soon as the government stated an interest, and publicly said their privacy agreements did not cover cooperation with criminal investigations. Obviously, any law enforcement agency that actually HAS a warrant will get any information they desire (since it will apparently be granted with a smile even without a warrant.)

I do not think there will ever be any more hue and cry over that with regard to piracy than there was then with regard to terrorism. More importantly, even if there is, it will not make a bit of difference. It does offer some insight into the value of Obamas pledge to veto SO/PIPA: He also repeatedly said he would end the warrantless wiretaps—right up until the moment he was elected. Since then he has not only curtailed, but actually expanded them. So how much do you REALLY think his promise not to sign SO/PIPA "in its current form" is worth? If they are modified even superficially, or if he claims they are, he can sign them and keep that promise. For that matter, he did not promise a VETO; he only said he would not sign them, meaning they would automatically become law within ten days (not counting Sundays) unless he DID veto them or Congress adjourned.

Gotta read the fine print, especially with privacy agreements and ESPECIALLY with Obama.


Like I say, bigger fish, but for all the credibility-destroying attempts to paint them that way, SO/PIPA are not remotely a jackbooted crackdown, and new laws pursuing piracy more aggressively would not be either. My point was even SO/PIPA do not qualify as some sort of cyberfascism; whether or not netizens agree with that, CONGRESS does not, and they are the ones who make the laws. It would probably be a very good idea to offer the constructive suggestions Obama requested rather than let SO/PIPA opponents be portrayed as anarchists and/or conspiracy nuts. Not that I am saying you are doing that, but a great many opponents are doing a FINE job of that without need for help from Big Media.


As many as Megaupload involved. How many luxury cars were parked in front of the mansion again? Let us say for the sake of argument that ALL online piracy were peer-to-peers: Where does one find those peers? Assume someone wants to download, say, the original Star Wars Trilogy. How do they find someone, or rather, dozens of someones, who has it? Unless software lets them type in the title, then goes out, finds places and gets it (in which case we are talking about software that can easily be made illegal to create and distribute, if it is not already,) they must at least find a site with a link, right? A site that, in addition to the link, also posts (for a nominal fee) singles in their area, hot XXX action, 5 ways to make $50,000/week working part time from home, etc.

Yes, increasingly fat flounder; for all the envy directed at overpaid movie stars and industry execs, the guy who ran Megaupload lived in the same opulence they did. He just did not do anything to earn it: THEY did it, then he ripped off their work. In their place, I would be upset also; in the place of an artist hoping to someday create the game, song, whatever that lets him quit the 60 hour a week job he works to feed and house himself and his family, I would probably be murderous. Take the money out of it, mainly by aggressively targeting those making money off it, and we eliminate much of the problem, because we shut off the tap at its source. There will still be people who spend far too much free time illegally cracking copy protected data for free to illegally distribute for free, but supporting themselves and dodging restrictions on sharing illegal data will prevent it causing significant problems.


The idea is to get between the pirate and his consumers, and it is a good one. That is one way to convince people to return to legal content: Make illegal content unavailable. Another way is to demonstrate to them that piracy has serious negative consequences for themselves as well as Big Media. Both options are better than Big Media trying to bribe people to stop stealing from them. "I will give you $5 if you stop stealing $50/week from me—please...?!" That will never work, and would not be right anyway (extortion is also illegal,) just two of several reasons Big Media will not go down that road.


Hopefully, but only if people provide the necessary input on how to do that. I would not leave that solely to Big Technology either, unless you want a bill that simply carves out exemptions to protect them, and thus that internet economic sector governments want to preserve, while ignoring all civil liberties issues. What will not work, or prevent abusive laws, is starting from the perspective that

1) Piracy is not a big deal,
2) It is the fault of the people being stolen from, not the thieves, and
3) Even if both those things are not true, the law is powerless to stop it.

I do not know how much time you have spent around lawyers or courts, but I have some second hand familiarity with them: When criminals claim they did nothing wrong, it was their victims fault and the law cannot touch them, the result is less often acquittal than an additional contempt of court charge.