In the thread one point that was being argued for was that the restrictions did nothing to piracy, people could still buy or acquire the goods somehow.

This is just a specific instance of the fact that banning something will just force it underground, make it harder to track, make acquisition become a gamble on authenticity/safety and create negative economic consequences.

In countries where easy download is not possible (either due to restrictions on access or third world lack of internet) the more amoral technologically advantaged start charging rent for access. All they have to do is download and charge something far less than the retail price. If SOPA does succeed in making online piracy harder, it creates an imbalance of power beyond just concentrating authoritarian levels of control in the hands of a few; it also opens up those whose priorities are not in tech to exploitation.

Money that could have been spent within the productive economy (not necessarily on the product) is now diverted to the hidden markets, possibly indirectly funding operations with more overhead. The fact that where access to internet is restricted, such as in third world countries, people are still willing to pay above zero but unwilling to pay at retail suggests a pricing mismatch and that there might be a set of conditions where people will pay at a profit. It also suggests the piracy problem will be compounded as it grows more heads, gets more complicated, gets driven underground and becomes more hazardous. Malware authors may be rubbing their hands in anticipation of writing movie downloading or subscription sites.

If I were to define a minimal basis for which people decide to torrent something its: [level of want, ease of legal access, relative cost of legal access, benefits of legal access, ease of pirating, cost of pirating, weighted odds of getting caught * cost of getting caught]. What SOPA is trying to do is make the cost of catching people illegally sharing super high. Except its not going to work because the infringers are not directly affected by the actual consequences. This is part of why it is hard to explain the consequences to a lay person.

What the producers need to focus on is to increase the ease and benefits of legal access and price reasonably. You can't effectively charge for information. But you can charge for information laced with convenience. People are risk avoiding and are even happy to buy things when they aren't treated worse than the actual infringers. For example, the ease and benefits from buying games on steam so completely dwarfs the ease of piracy that I prefer to not pirate a game even when I think the cost is too high because it is just not worth the hassle and I have experienced something better. I'd rather wait for a sale or prices to drop. I believe most people with a stable monetary situation would actually prefer to not "have" to pirate.

The argument of whether you are entitled to information you cannot access (e.g. tv shows in U.S. not appearing in Europe or overly expensive) is orthogonal and based on personal ethics. The practical reality is enough people will pirate if the conditions are right and there are those who weigh cost above all else - all the money "lost" to them could never have been gotten at a profit in the first place. Rather than whining and holding the internet hostage, the goal should be to maximize conversion and retention of those who can be reasonably swayed to buy while minimizing your costs as a business.

Is this a case of the big publishers committing something akin to the sunk cost fallacy?