The issue: Viacom wants to get paid more than Google wants to pay it for all of those fuzzy, two-minute clips from programs like “The Daily Show” that users post to YouTube. The companies tried to negotiate a deal, but the talks failed, so Viacom is suing for $1 billion.

I am not a lawyer, and I have no idea how this lawsuit will wind up. I suspect it is mainly a bargaining tactic by Viacom. But I know one thing: This fight isn’t primarily about consumers and their rights, and its outcome won’t necessarily make things better for Internet users.

Consumers won’t be a party to this case any more than they were in the room when the latest major copyright law was passed by Congress. That law, the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, was enacted at the behest of record labels and movie studios. Their purpose was to stop people from using computers and the Internet to distribute digital copies of material to which they didn’t hold either the copyright or a distribution license.

That idea makes sense. Unlike some Internet zealots, I believe that intellectual property is real and that some form of copyright is appropriate to protect it. I am against the unlicensed copying of DVDs for sale on street corners, or the mass uploading of songs to so-called sharing sites.

The Internet and technology companies managed to insert a clause in the DMCA sparing them from penalties for carrying copyright content on grounds they were just innocent conduits. That will be a big issue in the Viacom case. But consumers got no such get-out-of-jail-free card.

In fact, the DMCA, and other recent laws and regulations passed under pressure from media companies, are pretty hostile when it comes to consumers. They turn essentially innocent actions into unlawful behavior, because they define copyright infringement too broadly. They have given rise to a technology called Digital Rights Management that causes too many hassles for honest people and discriminates against the new digital forms of distribution.

Even Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who created a DRM system for music that actually has worked, recently called for an end to copy protection of legally sold music, mainly because the record labels apply that protection only to online sales, not to physical compact discs.

Most honest people wouldn’t consider it piracy to buy a CD, copy it to a computer and email one of the song files to a spouse or friend. But the record industry, backed by the laws it essentially wrote, does. Most honest people wouldn’t think that uploading to YouTube a two-minute TV clip, which they paid their cable company to receive, is piracy. But Viacom, backed by the laws its industry essentially wrote, is demanding that Google remove all such clips.

To be fair, Viacom, unlike the misguided record labels, isn’t suing the actual consumers who posted these clips. It’s suing Google because it claims Google is making money from them and refusing to pay for that privilege.

Google isn’t blameless here, either. It does make money, at least indirectly, from other companies’ copyright material, for which it didn’t pay, even though it has negotiated some paid deals and says it is willing to negotiate others. And while Google says it diligently removes all copyright clips for which it hasn’t secured paid rights, every YouTube visitor knows that this system is, at best, imperfect.

As a nonlawyer, I think these clips seem like “fair use,” an old copyright concept that seems to have weakened under the advent of the new laws. Under fair use, as most nonlawyers have understood it, you could quote this sentence in another publication without permission, though you’d need the permission of the newspaper to reprint the entire column or a large part of it. A two-minute portion of a 30-minute TV show seems like the same thing to me.

But why should I have to guess about that? What consumers need is real clarity on the whole issue of what is or isn’t permissible use of the digital content they have legally obtained. And that can come only from Congress. Congress is the real villain here, for having failed to pass a modern copyright law that protects average consumers, not just big content companies.

We need a new digital copyright law that would draw a line between modest sharing of a few songs or video clips and the real piracy of mass distribution. We need a new law that would define fair use for the digital era and lay out clearly the rights of consumers who pay for digital content, as well as the rights and responsibilities of Internet companies.

If you don’t like all of the restrictions on the use of digital content, the solution isn’t to steal the stuff. A better course is to pressure Congress to pass a new copyright law, one that protects the little guy and the Internet itself.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. See video versions of my reviews at wsj.com/mossbergvideo.

Partisans of these platforms can argue all day about which is better. But the competitors have some things in common. Windows computers and Apple Macintoshes can both display the same photos and office documents, and play the same MP3 songs and YouTube videos. BlackBerrys and Treos can receive the same emails and call the same phone numbers.

It isn’t perfect. There are some files that don’t play well across platforms. But most common content does.

Yet there’s another technology competition that doesn’t share content well and offers few, if any, benefits to consumers. It’s the fight among two groups of technology companies and movie studios to sell a successor to the DVD. Each has developed a new type of disc that has the ability to show movies in high definition. To my eye, the pictures they deliver are identical.

Neither of these competing new discs, called Blu-ray and HD-DVD, works in current DVD players. They require very expensive new players, and the new players can’t handle both new disc formats, only one or the other.

Adding to the annoyance: Some movie studios release movies only in one of the two formats. Paramount and Warner Brothers support both formats, but Universal supports only HD-DVD, and Disney, Fox and Sony only Blu-ray.

So, in order to be sure you can play any movie released as a high-definition disc, you would have to replace your old DVD player with two new, much costlier players. It would be like having to buy separate TV sets to watch different networks’ programs.

Now, however, one gutsy company, LG Electronics, of Korea, a longtime member of the Blu-ray camp, has broken ranks and introduced a new combo player that can handle three formats: Blu-ray, HD-DVD, and regular old DVDs. It’s called the BH100 Super Multi Blue.

I’ve tested this combo player and found that it plays both new formats, as well as regular DVDs, just fine. But it’s more expensive than most single-format players and has some serious limitations when navigating through the menus on HD-DVD titles. For now, I can only recommend it for serious videophiles with deep pockets, but I’m hoping it’s the start of a trend that will end the foolish war.

The BH100 costs $1,200. That’s vastly more expensive than the newest DVD players, which, for less than $100, can take a regular DVD and “upscale” it so it looks better on a high-definition set. But that $1,200 isn’t so outrageous if you compare it with the price of buying two separate Blu-ray and HD-DVD players, which can reach or exceed $1,000 total. And the new LG takes up only one input on your TV, occupies less space on your component shelf and requires just one remote control.

I tested the LG combo player on my high-definition TV with this year’s Oscar-winning best picture, “The Departed,” and with “Superman Returns,” each of which is available in both of the new formats, as well as on DVD.

All played perfectly. The picture looked great in both formats and was noticeably better than an upscaled DVD image, which the LG unit also can produce. The LG outputs both new formats in a high, but grossly overhyped, resolution called “1080p.”

But the BH100 did a much better job with the Blu-ray discs than with the HD-DVD titles. That’s because while the combo player can play HD-DVD movies perfectly, it can’t display the HD-DVD discs’ menus for selecting scenes or accessing special features.

These menus usually offer the title and a photo to identify a scene, and the title and/or a description of the special feature. But on the LG BH100, the HD-DVD menus have no pictures, titles, or descriptions and look nothing like the original. They only identify scenes by number and duration. That makes it hard to find, say, the deleted scenes from “The Departed,” or the documentaries on the Superman disc.

The BH100 was based on a Blu-ray-only player and lacks the special chips HD-DVD players use to display the menus properly. LG had to concoct its own rudimentary replacements for those menus. The company says a future combo model could include the chips and thus display the HD-DVD menus as well as it does the Blu-ray menus, but it hasn’t decided whether to make such a product.

One reason for that decision may be the competing approach to solving the stupid disc war. Warner Brothers is working on a combo disc, instead of a combo player. This disc would hold both the Blu-ray and HD-DVD versions of a movie, so you could pop it into whichever type of player you own.

Until the electronics and movie companies support universal high-definition players and/or universal high-definition discs, I don’t recommend that most people invest in either technology. Why prolong a war that’s bad for consumers?

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. See video versions of my reviews at wsj.com/mossbergvideo.