There's no argument about the facts presented in the image: The user experience for watching big studio movies at home is terrible. I can stream music all around my various devices, select them from a jukebox, it's amazing and yes, Louis CK, I'm happy. Movies, not so much. DVDs are cumbersome and encumbered with extra nonsense as shown above.

My government is being pressured by the USA to criminalize ripping a DVD into a file even if the only thing I do with the file is watch the movie at home on exactly the same device that plays a DVD. I can "buy" some movies on iTunes, but not in HD. And they have DRM that restricts moving them from device to device. I have anxiety about DRM, I never know if the DRM servers will be shut down and I'll be left locked out of my movies, as has happened repeatedly in Entertainment history.

All of this is, of course, accepted fact. There is one experience for people who circumvent the studio's DRM distribution, and another for people who subject themselves to it.

So what was the debate about, you may ask? Well, my friend suggested that he'd rather go with the first option (this was not a confession to actually doing anything, of course, just expressing a preference). The response was an accusation that he was stealing from the hard-working creative types who make movies, or perhaps from the hard-working extras, runners, set decorators, truck rental companies, or whomever else is in the business of making movies and doesn't fit our prejudices of being an evil entertainment executive.

So are people who share movies slavering pirates taking the bread out of the mouths of hard-working people? I'm inclined to think not, but I understand that some people think that sharing movies is theft. Are people who buy DVDs and then download HD versions of movies because they didn't buy a Blu-Ray player thieves? How about people who buy a DVD and then rip it to a file so they can stream it around their house? Are they thieves?

We could debate these questions, but here's the thing: To argue these questions is to fall into a trap that the studios have carefully prepared for us. They have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and PR just to lead us into arguing about whether we should "steal" movies or put up with their customer-hostility. We argue about which of these two options is worse: Depriving hard-working people of their money or depriving ourselves of a decent home movie experience. Arguing about whether sharing movies is piracy is a way of arguing about how bad option number one is so we can say it's the better of the two choices. But don't fall for the trap: The problem here isn't whether sharing movies is piracy. The problem here is that we only have two choices: piracy or lunacy.

I'll say it another way. Stop asking whether sharing movies is or isn't better than the DRM-infested crapware the studios are selling. Start asking why we are only allowed to choose between sharing movies and enduring them.

The whole thing is a false dichotomy, brought about because the studios refuse to give us more options. They could choose to sell DRM-free movies for a premium over movies with DRM and see what happens. Borland tried that with Turbo Pascal and sales went up. Apple dragged the music labels kicking and screaming into trying that and revenues went up. The studios could give us another option, but they choose not to. Their business strategy is clearly to exclude the middle, to create two unreasonable positions and argue that theirs is the "less unreasonable" position. Thanks to their lobbying and the fact that the citizens of the US are vassals to their bought-and-paid-for lawmakers, an American faces a choice between enduring the crap on a DVD or jail time. Even if he purchased the DVD!

This is a lot like sports arbitration: When an athlete goes into arbitration, they argue back and forth, and then the team and the athlete's agent prepare compensation proposals. The arbitrator has to pick one without modification. Let's say the arbitrator believes the athlete ought to get M$2.5 a year. The team offers M$2, and the agent says M$2.8. Well, they're both wrong but the agent is "less wrong," so M$2.8 it is. As long as the arbitrator is not allowed to send them both back to be redrafted, you get ridiculous outcomes. And that's how it is here. You have two unreasonable positions, and you must pick the less unreasonable way to watch a movie.

And there is only one person to blame for the mess: The studios. They're the ones who carefully constructed a system where you have to choose between jail and crapware, and where movies your grandparents watched as a child are still covered by copyrights. So the next time this old argument comes up, don't fall into the trap of arguing whether sharing movies is piracy. Instead, ask why our only choice is between piracy and lunacy.