I'm thinking (possibly hoping) that if the scare spreads, it will be the big sites that go dark, as it were. There are a lot of smaller, lesser-known hosting sites out there that probably don't worry so much about being nabbed, and people that want to file share will do it even without Fileserve, Mediafire, etc.
You tend to see it with these kinds of things... the most popular ones are targeted, and it just makes way for some of the lesser known hosts to shine. Probably a never-ending cycle in the long run, but there's so much money in that advertising market that I don't think it will ever really go away.
The gov would have to go balls deep into regulatory interference and traipse over all sorts of freedoms to nip it in the bud. I think the recent back-lash over SOPA and the result of that backlash gives you a pretty good idea that big bro is only willing to take things so far before their interests get too muddied in political waters, with the right kind of backlash. The kind of backlash that has dollars behind it, I.E. Google, etc.
If it had only been some hippies protesting in city parks, it wouldn't have changed anything.
Alternately, there's the pressure from the entertainment industry... but what we have here is the entertainment industry's dwindling dollars versus the dollars of corporations that run the very technology and ideas that are making the entertainment industry's dollars negligible in the first place. If I were a betting government, I'd bet on the lobbyists who sided with Google, Microsoft, and the other folks who don't want SOPA.
So, I'm holding out hope.
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