It's sooooo hard to follow the law! Can't we just abandon it? What's more important, centuries of legal protections for individual liberty or protecting obsolete business models and at best bringing small time white collar criminals to justice?
MPAA and RIAA's latest attempts with SOPA, PIPA and ACTA were done specifically to avoid due process, so they can decide who goes down, and also to put the burden on a 3rd party for enforcing that so they don't have to waste their own money. They will push the laws/Constitution to the breaking limit to get what they want.
But I think they screwed up with SOPA and PIPA. They got too greedy too fast, and they broke the camel's back with it. They should be very afraid that not only all such laws will be stopped now, but that the tide will turn against them and they will end up with weaker copyright laws than they had before they started with SOPA, and maybe even fewer sales because of the increased hatred towards them.
Ultimately, they really need to change their thinking and how to approach the piracy problem. Copyright is not ownership, or at least it's not ownership like in owning a house. No idea is 100% original. It's all created from prior knowledge and ideas. And once you build upon it and improve it, you must also allow others to use it, modify it, and improve upon it once again. You benefited from others works, now let others benefit from yours. There probably should be some kind of copyright law to help recover the costs, but that's something the whole society has to decide, not just MPAA/RIAA, and it definitely shouldn't be as strict and as perpetual as it is today.
