this is all g.r.r.m.'s fault, anyway

[rone]

Let's be clear: i don't like The Oatmeal.  I found Matthew Inman's humor juvenile but inoffensive at first; even in the cartoons that had material that i liked, his delivery seemed off in the way that the dorkiest of nerds have when they overtell or overexplain a joke.  He finally lost me with his issues-revealing Utilikilts cartoon, and that's colored everything else that i've had the misfortune to witness (and you'd call me an idiot for continuing to follow links there, and you'd be right).  His approach to things in his life is relentlessly adolescent, and his current comic about how HBO has forced him to torrent the "Game of Thrones" series, which has been pounded across my social network with much delight by my so-called friends, is a prime example of this: entitlement and rationalization in the face of unenlightened self-harm (and, yes, the fact that it's about the much overrated "Game of Thrones", which book many of my friends inexplicably love and consequently turned them into morbidly obsessed fans of the HBO series, doesn't help).

Here's the thing: HBO doesn't owe anyone the "Game of Thrones" series outside of the terms in which they make it available (i.e., pay a shitload of money a month to the local cable monopoly and be glad that they deign to convey their munificence to your hovel).  Is Inman truly advocating that we should we bend or break the rules every time an incompetent business doesn't offer us their product in a timely fashion after we've declined to adhere to their idiotic terms and conditions, simply because we really, really want it?

If you're going to torrent it, torrent it, but don't waste time rationalizing it.  Just because the MPAA is acting like Javert doesn't mean that you're Valjean, and "Game of Thrones" isn't a piece of bread.

Comments

[thorfinn]

I think he's just making that point that if you make it impossible for people who *want to give you money* to give you money, they'll just give up and get a copy of your content some other way. He's right - since iTunes (and the music studios consenting to it and other digital music marketplaces) made it extremely easy for me to obtain DRM free music legally, I have pirated zero music tracks.

I've happily bought a few movies the same way, but almost nothing I actually want is available until ridiculously long after it's relevant. So usually I just shrug and get on with my busy life and don't even bother torrenting, but there are certainly shows I'd want to watch when they come out and would be happy to pay for, that I just can't obtain in any legal fashion whatsoever. Not even by ordering a physical disc, since I'm not in North America.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

This, pretty much. I didn't take the comic as a justification, so much as a symptom of something I see all the goddamn time, from publishers who refuse to get into e-books at all (which is incredibly stupid of them) to companies that sit on something forever because they can't make money off it. Dude, if that's the case, put it in the public domain and let someone else have a go.

Ironically, being a librarian may be turning me into one of those screw-copyright-and-its-bedfellows people.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

It may well be a symptom, but that's not how he wrote it. He wrote it as a first-person story of what happened to him, and he doesn't "HAVE or WANT cable", so he wants the show on his terms, which i'm pretty sure is not how life works.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

That is a point, certainly, but it's not the one he's making. The point he's making is, "GOSH, I TRIED REALLY HARD TO DO IT ALL LEGAL AND STUFF, BUT THE ONLY WAY I CAN OBTAIN IT IS THROUGH MALICE AND SUBTERFUGE OH WELL!" The other option, of course, is not getting it because it isn't available.

Before iTunes, i didn't download any music tracks via peer-to-peer clients, because i simply wasn't interested in that sort of behavior. Somehow, obtaining data to which i have no license doesn't strike me as a hardship. The imbecilic business decisions from the Hollywood cartel somehow do not force me to compromise my ethics.

[thorfinn]

I think that's just theoatmeal's "I'm an asshole" comic style. You don't like it, and I'm sure you're not the only one who hates it. :-)

And yes, certainly, you can just not obtain the content. Which also doesn't give the idiot publishers any money. One is not magically justification for the other, no, that's why it's still the devil typing into the computer to get the torrent. It's still wrong.

It's just that if you don't even provide people with a way to legally give you money for content, it's also pretty wrong to turn around and claim that you're losing money because of copies of your content floating around, when the situation is that those people never even had the *option* to give you money for your content in the first place.

[vampyrecat.livejournal.com]

I'd never seen that particular Oatmeal comic before (kilt). Charlotte insisted that I let her look at the last panel for a while. I asked her "what is that?" She giggled and said "a but!" She is 4. I didn't think it was funny and I was thinking that the guy in the comic was an asshole. I mean, there is nothing about a kilt that forces you to think about balls. I never think about balls when I see a kilt. I think about legs because that's what I can see. What an ass. That said, I have seen some Oatmeal strips that I liked a bit but I can't remember what they were.
Also, you are of course right about intellectual property theft in this case. Making people pay for a new release for a few years is totally reasonable. Making copyrights valid 50 years after the original creator's death is not. I am in the "information wants to be free" camp AND the "artists and authors and such need to be compensated" camp. My main objection to the MPAA is that they are primarily distributors, NOT creators. However, in the case of HBO's original content, they should be able to charge whatever they want and I am content to wait 9 to 18 months for it to be available on Netflix. Just please for the love of God people stop the spoilers.

[whipartist.livejournal.com]

I might argue that HBO *does* owe someone the Game of Thrones. They owe it to their stockholders to sell the series to Matthew Inman if he wants it.

In a publicly-traded company, the executives have a fiduciary obligation to maximize shareholder value. It seems pretty obvious to me that they (and most of the entertainment industry) are failing pretty badly in this regard. When customers desperately want to pay you for your product and you make that difficult or impossible, you're probably fucking up.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

So find an HBO stockholder and a lawyer with a class-action hard-on and get `em to sue HBO.

Could be worse; HBO is owned by TimeWarner, which also owned Time Warner Cable until three years ago. Now TWC is fully independent. For reals!

[(Anonymous)]

There are very few things the theft of which can be explained by: "But I want it." Many people seem to feel, however, that that's an adequate justification for stealing "content".

"Gee, Jimmy, how'd you get that Bugatti Veyron I see in your garage?"
"I wanted it, but they wanted, like, totally ridiculous amounts of money for it - and I was willing to give them, like, twenty bucks, but nooo, so I took it. It's their fault for having such a stupid pricing scheme."

What a totally dumb-ass argument, and yet I hear ostensibly intelligent people bleat something very much like this about all sorts of things they've stolen. As if stealing THIS is somehow different.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I hesitate to use the word 'stealing', but it's certainly an appropriation of an item to which one has no right, so i don't know what else to call it.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_lj_sucks_/]

That's nothing, I hear ostensibly intelligent people equate physical objects being stolen with intangible information being copied without depriving the owner of it. What a dumb-ass argument that is.

While I don't particularly like The Oatmeal either,

[notr.livejournal.com]

I think you've misread this one. He's not rationalizing his behavior. He's lamenting how easily expediency overcomes his own better nature.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I guess i could more easily believe it if i thought that he had a better nature.

[(Anonymous)]

You're absolutely right, Rone. Just because I want it doesn't mean I get to have it.

However, given all of the RIAA/MPAA hand-wringing about how we need to destroy the Internet to save their business model, it does seem a little bit ridiculous for these folks to be so obviously sitting on their hands, rather than working out better business models. They're leaving money on the ground, and then turning around and crying poor.

So, yeah, I also think it's important to point out that the RIAA/MPAA also don't get something just because they want it, and the ways in which they're failing.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

I find the whole general area to be a variety of greys rather than simple black and white, at least in the context of regional distribution silly-buggery. Yes, they don't owe me anything, but like it or not this stuff is a part of the culture, and if you can't access it then you can't participate in that culture.

If the material is being made available and you've got the money, damned well pay for it. If it's available but you genuinely can't afford it, well, that's a judgement call for you to make, and I'm not going to condemn you for snarfing the odd TV show or album under those circumstances. But this doesn't mean "I have the money but don't wanna pay", it means "I really don't have the money, I'm working casual hours as a barista making minimum wage".

When it's simply not available, well, yeah, you don't have a Right to it, bad luck, but there's no loss to the rightsholder in your nabbing a copy so I don't regard it as being a significant ethical problem.

For myself, I don't pirate music. I pay for cable (which is not the usual case in Australia) though even there a fair bit of stuff just never shows up -- there is no HBO or Showtime in the US sense, there's a network called "Showtime" but it's not particularly affiliated with its namesake -- and if I know something (like Game of Thrones) is going to be coming to cable I'll wait rather than torrent it.

Even though that completely excludes me from any discussion of it online, because most of that happens right after it first airs in the US, and it'll be at least ten weeks before it starts here...

So, yeah, cultural participation is a thing. It's not all just entitled "I wanna!", and where there's no loss being made it's a bit rich to complain about it.

(As to the Oatmeal, not a huge fan either.)

[nothings.livejournal.com]

As you may have noticed, I hate the Oatmeal as well (for a different reason: his site is optimized around getting hits, not being truthful, as is clear from his site design and his SEO past).

The thing that bugs me about the tweetings this received on my timeline was people were all 'this, this demonstrates why people pirate content', when in fact HBO is such a weird outlier as a content producer that the narrative you get for an HBO show is radically different from one that you would get for a typical TV show (where it WOULD be on Netflix and Hulu and etc), and it would sound a lot less compelling (since "they make it so hard" would be falser).

[http://users.livejournal.com/_lj_sucks_/]

I don't find HBO to be an outlier particularly. I've hit the same situation wanting to watch Dr Who, and a worse situation wanting to watch UK comedies like Psychoville.

Most recent example, the documentary "Earthflight" which my family all raved about and told me I had to watch last year. It's a Discovery co-production, but they're just sitting on it as far as I can tell. No plans to show it according to their web site, no DVD release, not on iTunes, not on Amazon, not on Netflix. Yes, I went looking to buy it, and they turned me down.

Yeah, maybe the morally pure thing to do would be to wait indefinitely until they deign to broadcast it, then wait a few more weeks for it to show up online or on DVD. But really, is that a reasonable expectation? Maybe if they eventually release it, I'll buy the Bluray. In the mean time, BitTorrent came to the rescue.

It's the ecology

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

I think you always have to ask yourself the question, "Does this damage the creative ecology?"

Re: It's the ecology

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

It probably does, when the material is readily available. If people in the US are all downloading HBO shows instead of subscribing to HBO, or even downloading broadcast network shows instead of getting them from a source where the network gets some revenue, then that damages the funding for the creatives.

But where the material simply isn't available I don't believe the torrent thing is damaging the creative ecology. It's demonstrating unmet demand, and the experience has been that when supply is made available, the demand shifts to the "legitimate" revenue-generating source.

The Oatmeal dude's thing is harmful, he has the option to subscribe to HBO. People outside the US mostly don't.

[mister-borogove.livejournal.com]

I can laugh at a guy who equates Utilikilts with balls without myself equating Utilikilts with balls, and likewise, I read, enjoyed, and tweeted about the Game of Thrones strip without deciding it was okay to torrent Game of Thrones.

The strip was funny, to me, because I had taken a very similar series of steps, and ended up sighing a fuck-you-HBO sigh. The devil on my right shoulder, in this case, was shouted down by the avatar of laziness, rather than any sort of angel. I don't have to reach the same conclusion as Inman in order to appreciate the thought process.

Is your ethical stance moved at all by the fact that HBO uses well-established mind control techniques to create demand for their product, and that they very likely engage in unethical business practices on a regular basis?

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I'm all for "fuck you, HBO" as a rationale. I'm not in favor of painting their intransigence as an extenuating circumstance.

[nothings.livejournal.com]

"wrong" + "wrong" = ???

[prock.livejournal.com]

This rant seems a bit too far out in "meta meta" land for me to care about. Maybe I should torrent GoT and see what the big deal is.

[heliumbreath.livejournal.com]

Between HBO ensuring I don't get to see any of this, and all the reviews I've heard being snark from trusted cynics like yourself, I'm sure I have many better uses for my time and other resources than to take an interest in this alleged show.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

*shrug*

I watched it, I enjoyed it, I've pre-ordered the season one BD set.

Watching the first half of the first season prompted me to go read the books, which I also enjoyed a great deal.

Different people like different stuff. Film at 11.