Here’s the thing: I’m a copyright infringer. You know those people you hear about on the news who illegally download music and movies? I’m one of them.

The other day I wanted to see John Waters’ latest movie, A Dirty Shame. Well, actually I didn’t want to see it at all. I’m not really a fan of Waters’ stuff (much too vulgar for my innocent tastes), and I hadn’t heard great things about the movie at all. But I did kind of want to check it out, see what he did in there that was so crazy, see if it was really satire, or just vulgarity, or, more likely, a little from column A, a little from column B. But I definitely didn’t want to buy the DVD, upwards of $20 for a movie I didn’t really want to watch once, much less over and over. And I didn’t want to spend $10 (and two hours of my time) in the theater. And I didn’t want to rent it, because frankly I’ve got better things I want to rent.

So I went to a bittorrent website. I found the torrent for the movie (this is not a how-to article, so I’m not going to go into how), and I downloaded it.

A COPYRIGHTED WORK! THAT I DIDN’T PAY FOR! SITTING, WATCHABLE, UNPROTECTED, ON MY COMPUTER!

(I’d like to think John Waters, wherever he was at the second my download finished, felt a little, momentary stab right in his back at the lost royalties. He being John Waters, I think he would probably have liked that too.)

I didn’t watch much more than twenty minutes of the thing. It was what I expected. It stayed on my computer for maybe twenty minutes at the most. But I never paid a cent to see any of it, and, to me, that’s exactly what it was worth.

I downloaded the new Nine Inch Nails before I bought it. I downloaded Snow Patrol, and then decided not to buy it. I downloaded the new Ben Folds, and liked it so much that I encouraged maybe twenty people at the music store where I work to buy it.

I downloaded X-Men 2 in DVD form, and even burned that. I watched X-Men 2 last night off of a DVD I’ve never paid for. And a few years ago, I transferred a few episodes of a little show called Cowboy Bebop from my friend’s computer onto mine. He said it was good, I checked it out. Now, on my DVD shelf, I own the Cowboy Bebop movie DVD, which I paid the full 24.99 MSRP for. I never would have spent that money if I’d never seen the pirated version of the TV show that I saw.

See how I consume media? I’m willing to pay for what I like. I have plenty of DVDs (a shelf full of TV boxed sets), two game systems, lots of PC games. But I’m not willing to pay for what I’m not interested in. And before I pay over $20 for a DVD or a game or a boxed set, I want to know what I am and am not interested in.

Fortunately for me, a copyright infringer, things will always be this way. P2P is out of the bag. There will never be a time in the future at which point I cannot download what I want. There will never be a time when I can’t listen to a new album without paying for it, or download a movie that’s still in theaters. The P2P community has already proven that when one network shuts down, another arises in its place. When people get found out and sued, the network will go anonymous. When one bittorrent site gets shut down (as a few famously did earlier this year), three more pop up in its place. I will always be able to download practically whatever I want.

The question, then, is whether or not it is legal. At this point, because of the antique copyright law in place, it isn’t. At some point in the future, it will be.

That point, however, isn’t today. Because today’s Grokster decision isn’t about the P2P network users. It’s not about me, the infringer, at all. It’s about the people who make the things I use to download all this music and all these movies. And what the Supreme Court told these people, these ingenious people who brilliantly came up with new technology for the world to use, is to watch your backs.

Watch your backs, Grokster and Bittorrent, they said. Watch your backs, Apple. Careful, Microsoft. Don’t even think about it, content delivery innovators. We have our eye on you.

Here’s the legalese: “One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement . . . is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.” If you make a product, and then promote that it can infringe copyright, we get to sue your ass back to the stone age.

How did the honorable SCOTUS come to this decision. I’m Grokster. Here, have my program. See all those movies out there? You can use that program I just gave you to get them. Illegally. Have at it. Enjoy. Please use my program to download movies you don’t own.

Not so fast, SCOTUS says. You, Grokster, just told those people to download movies illegal. Not cool, and now you’re in big trouble. That’s why SCOTUS did what they did. Grokster, who set up a business model that involved making money off of stealing the work of others, is (most likely– unless they can prove that they didn’t) in deep trouble, starting today.

But here’s the other side of the SCOTUS decision. Let’s say I am Mike Schramm. Let’s say I’m a genius (I know, not hard to imagine). Let’s say I create this amazing program that lets you store MP3s DIRECTLY IN YOUR BRAIN. How cool, right? You use a few of the million or so terabytes of memory in your brain to store mp3s, and my little device, which you can just put over your ear like a headset, lets you listen to the mp3s stored in your brain. I’m Mike Schramm. Use my brain device to listen to your MP3s!

Not so fast, SCOTUS says. You, Mike Schramm, just told these people to copy music from their CDs into their brain. How do we know they paid for this music? Since they’re MP3s, in all likelihood, they didn’t. You encouraged them to use your brain device for copyright infringement. And now you have to clean out the bathrooms of the MPAA building with a toothbruth.

OK, well, SCOTUS probably wouldn’t say exactly that. But maybe my sponsors, who gave me money to make the brain device in the first place, would be a little afraid that SCOTUS might say that, and they might not give me money. Or maybe, knowing I might someday have to clean the MPAA’s bathrooms (shudder), I might never try inventing the brain device in the first place.

That’s who today’s decision really affects. Inventors, innovators, people who are constantly coming up with new ways to use technology to do the things we all love to do: watch movies, listen to music, play videogames. Careful, NCSoft. Your videogame, City of Heroes, lets people be their favorite superheroes, most of whom are copyrighted. Time to get the toothbrushes out and clean up Marvel’s bathrooms. Sorry, Apple, you let people put music they didn’t buy from iTunes on their iPod. Start scrubbing.

Meanwhile, I, the copyright infringer, can still download all the music and movies I want. I have the whole first season of Lost on DVD already– I’ve been downloading it and burning it as the season goes along. I even have extras– a Jimmy Kimmel special I downloaded, and a commercial for the season finale. Right now I’m listening to RJD2’s second album, which I downloaded a few weeks ago. I like it so much I might even download more of his stuff.

After all, I’m a copyright infringer. That’s what I can do. Today, of course, it’s illegal. But, someday in the future, whenever SCOTUS finally decides to make the decision about me instead of the people who create the technologies I use, it won’t be.