Most people in this country can’t say that their income is directly and significantly impacted by piracy. I can. The day a cracked IPA of Filterstorm was first posted online, I saw a massive jump in website traffic. I excitedly checked the previous day’s sales numbers, but was disappointed when I saw they were even with the day before. It didn’t take me long to figure out what had happened. Now every time I release an update, I see someone tweeting about a cracked IPA within just a few hours of release.

The solution to piracy is not massive governmental censorship. The solution to piracy is all about releasing quality products at reasonable prices with easy access. If you make people pay exorbitant prices or jump through hoops to buy your product—if you release a movie only on DVD and not for download—it becomes easier to pirate than to purchase, and people will.

Piracy does hurt me, but not nearly so much as it would if I were selling 10 times the prices, or outside of the App Store. The genius of the App Store is in its removal of barriers to purchase and installation.

Contrariwise, SOPA is the stick to my carrot, and an ineffective one at that. If a user uploaded copyrighted material to Vimeo, the Attorney General could require Google, Reddit, and all manner of sites to simply remove all links going not just to the particular video, but to the all of Vimeo, including the Filterstorm tutorial videos I host there. SOPA’s censorship is akin to banning the word “Boeing” because hijackers crashed their planes into the World Trade Center. It does little to stop the problem, but causes a lot of harm to the sites being censored, the sites having to implement the censoring, and everyone who enjoys user created content.

CORRECTION 2012.01.19: My example is incorrect, as vimeo uses the .com TLD and would be classified as domestic. I believe the example would be correct had vimeo’s address been vimeo.jp, for example.
Tiny link: http://taii.cc/5N