What gets me is that whether you take the high road and do without, or you take the low road and pirate it, HBO loses. A lost sale is a lost sale.
You already know I'm not into watching horrible people kill slightly less horrible people, which seems to be the whole point of the series, but even if it was something I wanted to watch I couldn't be arsed buying it on their terms _or_ ripping it. My ethics and your ethics don't make the creators one red cent more than Matthew's subterfuge.
They should be just as concerned about their actual bottom line - the lost sales - as the positive externalities - the OMG someone's watching it without paying panic we're getting from the MPAA and RIAA and their hangers-on. But they're not seeing us, they imagine that all the Matthews of the world would decide to pay for HBO instead of doing something else with their money.
HBO loses either way
You already know I'm not into watching horrible people kill slightly less horrible people, which seems to be the whole point of the series, but even if it was something I wanted to watch I couldn't be arsed buying it on their terms _or_ ripping it. My ethics and your ethics don't make the creators one red cent more than Matthew's subterfuge.
They should be just as concerned about their actual bottom line - the lost sales - as the positive externalities - the OMG someone's watching it without paying panic we're getting from the MPAA and RIAA and their hangers-on. But they're not seeing us, they imagine that all the Matthews of the world would decide to pay for HBO instead of doing something else with their money.
Maybe "Black March" will wake them up.