Also consider this. If the MPAA and RIAA had gotten their way to begin with here's some of the things that wouldn't have happened.
First of all we wouldn't have had VCR's and Tape recorders and as a result we wouldn't have DVD's and burnable disc. Hollywood claimed in the beginning that VCR's would ruin them. Now they can't fathom being without their home video sales.
The MP3 player would have never hit the market had the RIAA won it's suit against Diamond's Rio Player, and Apple, one of the biggest contributors to the economy would never have experienced a renaissance seeing as how the capital to contribute to R&D on the iPhone and iPad would have never been generated without the money earned from the iPod.
Furthermore the I-Tunes store wouldn't have emerged which offered individual tracks at the reasonable price of $0.99. Streaming services like Netflix would have either never been invented or wouldn't have emerged until recently.
YouTube would have been dead a long time ago.
TiVo? Forget it. On demand? Gone. Hulu? Watch the damn show when we tell you to watch it. Pandora? Maybe, but it would have been on the RIAA's terms.
And had SOPA passed we would have had extremely watered down versions of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Redit, and many other key sites that people use. Also who knows what next great innovation we saved by killing SOPA?
No good comes from giving into these two media cartels. Absolutely NONE. All the jobs and GDP produced by the tech industry was fought by the cartels at
EVERY TURN. They have never embraced innovation and have always had to be dragged kicking and screaming. The time has come to let them throw their tantrums in the cereal aisle and pretend like we don't even know who they are.
MPAA: A Medieval Guild, Committed to Fight Progress at Any Cost