In a move that reeks of hypocrisy, I bought a season pass of the current season of "30 Rock", knowing full well that its producers, NBC, was behind the crafting of SOPA and PIPA, both that I thoroughly trashed earlier this week.
Why then? Should I had just pirated the whole season? Or protest even harder, since "they" shut down megaupload, by not watching 30 Rock at all?
Here's the thing: while a bit too expensive for my taste, iTunes is the easiest way to watch TV shows. No need to install some software to pipe some RSS feed into some BitTorrent or Usenet downloader, no need to re-encode the video file for my iPad, no need to track manually which episodes I've seen or when within an episode I've stopped watching, and so on. Oh, and it's not like in Canada I have many legal choices. Apart from the price element (seasons are as expensive as their DVD equivalent), iTunes ends up being the best competitor to piracy by making it as convenient and easy to use as possible, a bit like Steam is for games, Netflix for movies and Rdio (or iTunes) is for music.
So I'm essentially sending a message by encouraging digital distribution that respect its users rather than stifling them with draconian DRM and exorbitant prices. It's not like I'm unwilling to pay, but I'm not going to encourage companies that stifle innovation from competition through political bribes. At least Apple, Amazon and Google are trying their best to move media distribution to the future, and by the amount of money they're making out of it, it seems to work.