Doctorow: The coming war on general-purpose computation

You are probably wrong about that. Most people have no idea how vast illicit drug sales are on a world wide business.

Right now it's _VERY_ safe to say that the international drug trade dwarfs the international trade in steel and textiles.

> So I would give SOPA max 10 years or so before the tech industry in US finds it such a pain so it would bye the politicians to abolish it.

No. This will likely not happen. The only hope we have is that we can apply political pressure right now to prevent SOPA from passing. The way the system is setup is that it's nearly impossible to get rid of laws once they are passed.

One thing you have to keep in mind is that law enforcement for these things is not like email filtering rules or something like that. There is no blanket application of the rules that affects all people and all situations. Laws are very selectively applied and this is done by design. The government would not be able to function properly without it. So you cannot depend on financial damage to internet industries to provide pressure to eliminate the law. The law will be selectively applied in order to avoid this fallout.

This is very common in financial laws. Every time a economic crisis comes along the politicians tend to pass a lot of laws and rules in order to appear that they have the ability to control the situation in some manner. These laws require bureaucratic upkeep... departments need to be financed to check compliance, prosecution and courts need to be financed, etc etc.

So these laws typically have fuses or time limits built into them in the form of budgetary controls. The congress will provide financing for 3 or 5 years and then after that they will need to pass another bill to pay for the enforcement. If at the end of that time period the uproar has died down then congress will just not pass a new bill and the enforcement of the law will die off.

This is VERY common. This is typically how it has worked for about 70 or 80 years now.

In the case of SOPA it will exist as a 'Sword of Damocles' hanging above the head of anybody that runs a popular blog, tries to engage in serious political debate, or engages in competition with a politically connected media corporation.

On the face of it the law is lubricious. The idea that somebody posting in the comments or forums on a website could post a link to a video and have that website shutdown based on a simple accusation is insane. It seems like it's unmanageable and poorly designed.

But the goal of the law is not to punish websites for having stupid users that violate the terms of the website.. it's just a tool that can be used to apply pressure to organizations that want to 'rock the boat'.