In the past few weeks, the film and tech worlds have been dueling over the pending Stop Online Piracy Act, HR 3261, which hugely increases the rights of copyright holders in preventing online piracy. Given that I’ve lived on both sides of that debate, it’s been an interesting fight to watch.

In my estimation, the tech crowd’s right that SOPA is a terrible piece of legislation. It’s full of impractical, draconian measures that will unintentionally yet severely cripple the entire internet.

And the tech crowd is also right that the movie studios’ approach to distribution in general is badly out of date. Ideas like windowing – releasing a movie sequentially across theatrical, VOD, DVD, and then digitally, rather than simultaneously on all those mediums – no longer make sense in light of how people prefer to consume media in today’s world. A film should be available on your iPhone at the same point it’s available in theaters, not six months later.

But I’m more than a bit surprised by how quickly tech people seem to be jumping from those two points to morally justifying the illegal downloading of films. I’ll be honest: I steal movies. But I think of it as ‘stealing’ them, and do it only when I can’t download and pay for them legitimately. Whereas the otherwise usually reasonable Fred Wilson, for example, apparently went off the hook just hearing that same copyright infringement referred to as ‘theft’. And it’s not just a matter of terminology: discussion on Fred’s post went on for nearly 500 comments, largely echoing the idea that the solution to movie piracy is to simply let people legally download any movie for free.

In light of that, it’s ironic that a great short piece by Maciej Ceglowski, founder of social bookmarking site Pinboard, has also been making the rounds. In it, Maciej points out that web services with no business model rarely stick around for long. By their very nature, free tools become increasingly impractical to maintain the more popular they become.

So it’s odd that people don’t see a similar problem with not paying for movies. Perhaps that’s because movies are often made for budgets in the tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars. While Maciej jokingly disclaims his post with “I run a paid bookmarking site. Every morning I wake up and dive into my vault of golden coins,” some of those movie budget millions do indeed go to paying a small number of people enough to actually fill gold coin vaults. But those movie stars’ salaries typically make up only a small percentage of a film’s overall budget – the vast majority instead ends up, as they say in the film world, ‘on the screen’. It pays modest salaries to an army of people, and covers a slew of logistical and technical costs, all of which go directly into making a movie a certain length, scale, and quality. In other words, reducing the amount of money a movie makes therefore necessarily reduces the amount of movie that gets made.

Sure, SOPA is a piece of crap, and the film industry’s entire model is badly broken. But that doesn’t mean that movie piracy isn’t a real problem for anyone who loves, or works on, films.