Their arguments are also pretty inconsistent. They complain about piracy, yet Avatar, a movie released in the age of piracy, is the highest-grossing movie of all time.
They aren't afraid of loses from piracy, instead they are afraid that they'll have to start producing quality content instead of dumb movies like Jeniffer's Body, Jack and Jill, Season of the Witch, Red Riding Hood and Shark Night.
I think they are afraid of Youtube, and they are even afraid of becoming obsolete. I think this is the real reason for SOPA.
What happened through the Opensource movement is beginning to repeat in the movie industry. Twenty years ago Big Blue, Cray et.al. laughed at Linux and GNU. Now Linux has gained world domination in the mobile market (Android), and now Linux is leading the TOP 500 supercomputer list.
I think the same phenomeon is starting right now in the movie industry. Private people produce massive amounts of short movies with low quality. But in the long run I believe they will produce high quality movies which will eventually compete with Hollywood standards.
With suitable software and upcoming PCs with multicore processors and possibly TB of RAM it is not an illusion that even a single person could produce movies which match Hollywood standard.
I wonder if they have drank their own Kool-Aid. Maybe they actually believe they could double their revenue if it wasn't for the pirates. Do they actually believe that every pirated film is a lost sale?
If this is how they think, then their behaviour w.r.t. SOPA et al. makes sense. They could double their profits!
They aren't afraid of loses from piracy, instead they are afraid that they'll have to start producing quality content instead of dumb movies like Jeniffer's Body, Jack and Jill, Season of the Witch, Red Riding Hood and Shark Night.