You want power? You need to fight. You want to negotiate you have to ask for things you would be willing to cut to get what you really want.
The biggest problems with the SOPA and PIPA legislation that everyone saw right off the bat was DNS filtering. You force sites off the internet by blocking their website from being recognized by DNS, the system that basically runs how the internet works.
DNS as a short example: Every computer connected to the network has a unique address, like a phone number that is that computers signature as it travles about online. There are a host of rules for what address your machine ends up with, and most machines have temporary numbers, when you connect you are given a number dynamically (DHCP), but websites have a Static Address, and DNS is the phonebook that translates www.yahoo.com to 98.139.180.149. Try it… both go to the same place. Big sites have the whole address to themselves, like yahoo, google ect.
but little sites like www.caffination.com -> 74.208.150.174 share the same number with other sites. And its the job of the DNS to sort all of that out.
Well with all of that explanation MPAA has taken the most offensive portion off the table. SOPA and PIPA live on, without the obvious flaw. now the problems which remain are just as bad, but a little less obvious. The laws would require the content providers to police everything that is ever submitted for possible copy-write violation, think about the volume of videos that youtube gets. should someone have to watch every single one as it is submitted. Would you be ok if it took a couple of months for your news and reports to get out?
The laws would also would attempt to legislate non us sites with a US law. How would you feel is Russia passed a law crippling a site you use?
This is like Haggling the MPAA and their friends never really wanted DNS filtering, but how much does it chill you that a company is talking about taking things out of our laws? An organization is negotiating with lawmakers on what they want. The system isn’t supposed to work this way, but it does and its about time it stopped.