What they were thinking, I suspect, has partly to do with the amount of money they get from their patrons in the Recording Industry Ass. of America and the Motion Picture Ass. of America--but only partly.
They are likely also annoyed and frustrated, like I am, at the appalling amount of piracy (not just movies and music; the DoJ has been aggressively targeting counterfeit sites hawking fake Rolex watches, designer handbags, and even tennis shoes) that organized crime, particularly Eastern European organized crime, is engaging in on the Web. I don't know about you guys, but I get, on average, 2-4 fake Rolex watch spam emails, 10-12 spam messages advertising fake Louis Vuitton goods, 1-2 fake Canada Goose spam emails, and lately about 20 spam messages hawking fake Christian Louboutin shoes. This kind of piracy legitimately does hurt retail sales in the United States, while pumping vast amounts of money into the coffers of organized crime.
The problem is, Congress is made up of a bunch of people who stopped keeping up with technology when the ball-point pen was invented. They have only vague ideas of what the Internet is, and more vague ideas still of how it works; when someone says something like "There's a big list of domain names on computers out there, and if you take a Web site off the list, nobody can go to the Web site any more" they think "Hey, that sounds like a great way to shut down these bootleg sites!" They simply lack the technical skill to understand why that doesn't work.
And their patrons at the Recording Industry Ass. of America and the Motion Picture Ass. of America are hardly any better. These are a bunch of guys who make their living screwing actors, writers, and singers; they're not technical wizards any more than the Congresscritters are, so when they're asked to help draft legislation, they come up with halfwitted, brain-dead, appallingly misinformed rubbish like SOPA.
So that's what they were thinking. They were thinking that they are being asked to legislate something they don't understand and don't have even a vague grasp of.
They are not malevolent (well, I take that back--some of them are), and they're genuinely astonished by the resistance to these proposals. That isn't an act. They sincerely don't understand why people think it's a bad thing to try to go after pirates, bootleggers, and mobsters--because they sincerely don't understand why the legislation they have written can never succeed. They simply aren't informed enough to. How could they be? They grew up in a time when almost all communication media, from newspapers to telephones, were centralized and had a single point from which they could be controlled. There's no way they are educated enough to be able to wrap their heads around a decentralized, distributed system like the Internet. Asking Congress to understand the Internet is like asking a dog to do calculus.
But the problems that these misguided, pig-ignorant bits of legislative excrement are trying to address won't simply vanish. The fact is, piracy *is* a problem. People *are* profiting from other people's work, and that's not cool. There currently aren't any effective ways to combat organized crime online, and one way or the other the tech industry has got to grow up and come to terms with that.
Part of the issue, I think, is the us-vs-them mentality that we have. Internet users see the Recording Industry Ass. of America and the Motion Picture Ass. of America as the enemy, and justify pirating content by how much they hate them. The respective Asses of America see Internet users as the enemy, a bunch of greedy, self0indulgent, entitled children who believe we have the right to have everything for free. And it's asinine, if you'll pardon the pun. We're both on the same side. When people are rewarded for creating, everyone wins. When people are discouraged from creating because the money ends up in the pockets of organized crime, everyone loses.
