Click. With one innocent flick of the finger, you’ve become a pirate. That’s all that it takes.We’ve all seen the ads on TV constantly reminding us downloading movies and music without paying is a crime. Not just a crime but piracy.

In other words, homes have become ships and computers have turned into cannons.

However, should these “pirates” be considered filthy criminals or consumer advocates? The entertainment industry has grown into a bloated giant that exists solely on swindling the American people. It’s getting what it deserves.

Many CDs cost about $15 these days. Are consumers supposed to pay that much money for one good song and a dozen crappy tracks the band just threw together to make the record company’s release deadline? That’s not artistry; that’s con-artistry at its finest.

What’s worse, many record companies masquerade their anti-piracy fight as a crusade to protect the works of the artists themselves, often referred to as intellectual property.

That’s rich. They pretend to care about the artists. Everyone knows that these modern-day minstrels are no more than a cog in the corporate machine. It’s all about the cash. I guess by “protecting intellectual property” they mean “making enough money to take my twenty-something stripper wife to Cabo San Lucas for Christmas.”

So, Joe T. McFrog is forced to pay about $15 for a bunch of bad songs he doesn’t desire. Worse, most of that money is going straight into some greedy, upper-level executive’s pockets, not to your favorite artist. From that angle, LimeWire seems like a pretty good option.

The same principle applies to downloading movies. They expect the general public to pay in upward of $7 to go see the latest Hollywood paint-by-numbers movie.

And what do we get for our money? We get to sit next to two 10th-graders whose uncontrolled lust for each other seems to be manifesting itself in the form of a face-eating contest. Then we spill our $5 soda and suffer through 100 minutes of whatever poor excuse for cinema Ben Affleck decided to star in this year. For every hit film, there are 20 big budget duds that make the IQs of the general public less well off than they were before.

Still, movie studios seem surprised with the rising tide of Americans who choose to download their releases. It’s not our fault MGM, Universal and Miramax throw ungodly amounts of money at actors to star in movies seemingly written by a group of marijuana-smoking 15-year-olds. So, instead of spending countless dollars to find the right movie, people would rather just try them for free. If someone genuinely likes a flick, they’ll buy it or go see it again in theaters. Downloading movies just eliminates wasting good money on overhyped duds littering Hollywood.

Simply put, file-sharing networks and other mediums of downloading media benefit the consumers, while holding distribution companies accountable for the junk they shovel into stores and theaters everywhere. It’s only fair. We won’t let them make such easy money off us forever. If they want us to pay, they have to improve their products. Downloading music and movies may not be considered right, but it certainly isn’t wrong.

David Hall is a freshman news-editorial journalism major from Kingwood. His column appears on Wednesdays.