Wikipedia staged a blackout last week, concealing its 3.8m articles for a day in a dramatic protest against SOPA and PIPA, the anti-piracy bills worming their way through US Congress.

The draconian laws being considered threatened the very architecture of the internet, affording massive media conglomerates the frightening power to shut down any websites they wanted to on the faintest whim, under the guise of stopping piracy.

Piracy is as thorny an issue as they come, and it’s a little like an embarrassing habit – we rarely admit it, but we’ve all picked our nose from time to time. Aside from the debate over whether file-sharing is really tantamount to stealing (or, as the IT Crowd sublimely parodied, whether that is something of a false equivalency), it’s thornier still when you work in the very industry that piracy supposedly harms. As it happens, you quickly find that downloading is ubiquitous as it is anywhere. I once briefly worked at company which produced an anti-piracy commercial campaign – let’s just say the campaign was somewhat hypocritical.

Performers and artists, without a doubt, should always receive fair and proportionate compensation for their work. But I don’t wholeheartedly buy the argument that piracy hurts the little guy, given the intrinsically unfair royalties system, and the enormous disparity in wages between above-the-line and below-the-line workers. When non-creative executives stop awarding themselves enormous sums while their skilled crew members are squeezed, I’ll listen to them about fairness.

Industry leaders have won themselves no fans in the argument, penalising file-sharers with shameless extravagance, such as valuing each pirated song at $150,000 and suing individuals for millions in “lost sales”. And Chris Dodd, CEO of movie industry body Motion Picture Association of America, all but confirmed that he lead a corrupt industry that bribes politicians regularly. “Don’t ask me to write a check for you”, he told Fox News recently, referring to Hollywood, “when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.” A petition has been started for the government to probe the MPAA – and rightly bloody so.

Incidentally, nowhere in this shouty debate has any industry spokesperson admitted that a contributing factor to falling sales might be directly correlated with – dramatic pause, takes off sunglasses – a decline in quality? Seriously. The last 10 years in film and music has not, by all accounts, been a volcano of creativity and originality – rather a largely stagnant pool of reconstituted, unoriginal lava. No one should have to pay to see a turgid mess like Transformers 3.

Ultimately, piracy is a service issue, not a payment issue. People like free stuff, sure, but more importantly, they like convenient stuff. People are lazy. I know I am. Why would I bother going to the trouble of figuring out where I’ve put my wallet, let alone leaving my centrally heated home and going to a shop to buy a DVD, when I could download Transformers 3 on my laptop and remain semi-clad under a duvet?

The solution lies in being more competitive, in innovations like Netflix and Spotify, in providing a better customer service rather than persecuting customers. You don’t solve piracy by going after the pirates – you solve it by being better than them.

(Footnote: my legal team have advised me to add that all of the above is lies.)

More John:

... on red carpets

... on silent film