Why is the United States Congress trying to enact SOPA and PIPA? Because I am a pirate.

That’s the simple fact of the matter: If piracy wasn’t such an issue for American rights holders (publishers, broadcasters, content creators), lobbies such as the RIAA and MPAA wouldn’t have donated millions of dollars to morally bankrupt Representatives and Senators and the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act would still be swimming in the ether.

Despite the terrifyingly hyperbolic tone that some anti-piracy literature takes — that piracy is akin to drug dealing, child slave labor, or crap like that — piracy obviously is an issue, even if we don’t agree on how big or pressing an issue it is. But why is piracy an issue in the first place? To answer that, I have to tell you why I pirate stuff.

Copyright is broken

In its current form, copyright laws are broken. It varies from country to country, but in most Western countries copyright law has devolved into some kind of drooling, malignant beast. In essence, copyright is meant to protect the creator of a work — be it a painting, book, video game, or movie — from being ripped off. Thanks to the force of lobbies, though, copyright law protects the interests of publishers and broadcasters. SOPA, which allows a publisher to point at a copyrighted work and demand that it be deleted from the interwebs, is the creation of lobbies and associations, not individual artists.

Let me give you an example of how copyright is meant to work. If I produce a painting and hang it in a gallery, copyright ensures that no one takes a photo and sells or prints copies. If I produce official copies of my painting and sell them, you are completely free to do whatever you like with your copy. If you want to deface it, you can. If you want to give it to someone as a gift, you can. This is what your money is meant to buy you.

It is thanks to broken copyright law that almost every form of digital content is now locked down with DRM. Games that are buggy, a pain to open, and can only be installed on one computer; cloud-based movies that you never truly own; books and music that can be removed from a device or account at any time, without warning.

That is why I pirate: When I buy something, I want to own it. I don’t want a publisher or broadcaster to dictate how or why or when I can use something that I own.

Digital distribution systems still suck

We have made massive leaps in the realm of digital distribution in recent years. Steam and iTunes are both fantastic, buying Kindle e-books is depressingly easy, and Netflix is awesome — but if you take a closer look, most of these services are still rife with issues.

iTunes is easy to use, but except for music, everything you buy is wrapped up in DRM. You can’t burn an episode of Glee to DVD and watch it on your TV. The problem with Netflix, of course, is that you never own what you watch; like Spotify, it’s a service that you must keep paying for if you want access to your favorite shows.

Then there’s the matter of timeliness. Steam and the music side of iTunes don’t have this issue — because they’re the de facto way of releasing a game or album — but have you seen how quickly DVD rips appear on sites like RapidShare or The Pirate Bay? Have you seen how easy it is to download stuff from these sites? And you can burn your downloads to DVD! Magic.

That is why I pirate: When I buy something, I want to be free to enjoy it however I like. I don’t want to be forced into “borrowing indefinitely” or only being allowed to play a movie through iTunes, on a computer.

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