Copyright has been bastardized. Its original purpose was to protect inventors and artists from wealthy interests: people who had access to the best distribution channels and would put the original authors out of business (if they could legally do so) by distributing their content without payment.

Copyright emerged in the same time as modern nations did in Europe and North America. No accident there. (Note that usage fees are called "royalties", a payment to the sovereign or the nation.) National governments believed (correctly) that the quality of arts and sciences would be much higher if inventors had a fighting chance of making a living without being born into the access that would enable someone to get a patron. It was a national pride issue: a desire for French or American or Spanish literature to be the best in the world.

Copyright replaced the patron system with mass micropayments and thereby democratized it. It's also a lot less expensive than a patronage system: you can get quality media for $1-2 per hour of use. That's pretty great. I wouldn't want to not have that.

So let me make that clear. Copyright isn't just a useful thing. It's actually (at its roots) a very liberal concept. It was to protect innovators and creators from wealthy, well-connected miscreants who would steal their work (and before copyright, many did) and compete against them with better distribution.

The problem in the modern economy is that copyright is being abused by the same class of people it was designed to hold back. It's way, way, way more transferable than it should be and we have a disease where copyrights and patents, being valuable, trickle up to the top of the social pyramid, under the effective control of a class of people who produce nothing except mean-spirited lawsuits.

Morally speaking: should you pay for stuff if you can afford it? Yes. I don't pirate if I can get the same level of convenience and quality through legal means. I have no problem with paying $1-2/hour for quality entertainment. That said, I'd much rather support the artists (and sound technicians, and actors) directly than support a bunch of shitbag executives who produce nothing. I would participate in an "under the table" mechanism allowing for that, legal or otherwise-- a "piratical" system that requires enough payment to reimburse artists and technicians as much as they'd take in royalties, but deprives the scumbag entertainment executives outright.

Honestly speaking, SOPA estabishes that the major corporate copyright owners are evil. Not just greedy and stupid, which are forgivable because great empires have been built on greed and stupidity. Evil. It deprives them of their moral high ground, and establishes that piracy-as-moral-statement might make sense.

I also think Facebook and Google deserve a lot of credit for coming out to fight SOPA/PIPA. Yes, Google has Youtube which would be in serious pain; but the fact is that Google and Facebook would (perversely) benefit from it. Large businesses do better in overreaching, ill-designed or undefined regulatory environments because they have the connections and resources to end up OK no matter what laws pass. It's small businesses that would wither and die if SOPA and PIPA were to pass. A lot of startups would have to shut down. "Social" technologies would become an oligopoly within a decade. The short-term effect for Google and Facebook would (my guess) be positive, so these companies deserve a lot of credit for looking at the bigger picture.