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this is all g.r.r.m.'s fault, anyway
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.
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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.
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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.
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Likewise with ebooks. Last time I checked, most of the people with ereaders (not all, but most) are perfectly capable of reading books on paper. They just don't wanna, which doesn't imply they don't have an *option* to buy the content.
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ETA: Incidentally, where are most of these torrent sites? Mostly not located in .us. Causation? I dunno, but I think it's an interesting correlation.
The whole argument is really about convenience. I want the content in a convenient format at a convenient time. As it happens, 99% of the time, if I can't get it in a convenient format at a convenient time, I'll just go engage with something else instead, whether that's eBooks, or movies, or music, or whatever.
It isn't that difficult to provide that convenience - and actually be more convenient than torrenting, as well as get paid. The book and video publishers, for some reason, just don't wanna.
Audio publishers seem to have mostly wised up, and are happily rolling in their continuing fat piles of cash.
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I still don't think that's a particularly ethical position. At least until we come up with a better model for this stuff than property, one of the points of property is that people aren't required to sell it to you. But you weren't arguing that, you were arguing whether the content providers have any right to complain, and on that front I think you've got a very strong point.
I will say, though, that while some of these online debates are sparked by people who are in a regional distribution black hole, most of them are started by entitled US residents who just don't want to pay for the content in the form provided even though they could and could get it. So one starts to develop a real knee-jerk reaction against the entitlement.
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And yes, my argument is not at all that they should be required to sell it to me, it's that since it would be actually quite simple for them to sell it to me conveniently (via a number of possible digital marketplaces), they're just choosing not to, therefore they are idiots who apparently don't want to be given money.
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The regional distribution thing has never made much sense to me, even knowing the background of it. I have some degree of tolerance for weird business models based on history (international publication rights, for example, do make real money for the author of the book, and most of the fixes would make them less money in the short run). But there's a limit, and the regional limitations on DVDs and games have passed that limit a while back into just seeming dumb.
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Besides, I'm a professional software engineer, have been for nearly 20 years, and 99% of my software authoring has been closed source. And even the open source stuff is still copyright protected. I'm entirely fond of copyright.
I just happen to think it's extremely stupid to put roadblocks in your potential customers' way when they want to pay you for a license to a copy. :-)
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Anime is its own special area in this discussion, of course.
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The short version of my feelings here: I believe that there is an ethical continuum in this area. Downloading a TV show that just aired and you missed for some reason: near-null on the ethics arena. Downloading a movie that is currently in theatres: much worse, heading towards stealing. Selling pirated games that aren't released yet: probably worse than outright theft. Most acts of piracy fall somewhere onto that continuum; it's important to recognize the differences.
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But I don't buy one's ability to purchase something as the discriminating factor. There are a bunch of things that I'd like to have that I choose not to or can't purchase for one reason or another. While I don't want to wholeheartedly endorse the idea of intellectual property, it's the best idea we've come up with so far for how to make sure people get paid for their work, and as long as we're using the concept of property, that means you don't get to have something you want just because you can't afford the asking price.
You may be able to defend your decision to download on other grounds, such as that it's just timeshifting content you've already paid for (I'm very sympathetic to that argument). But not on the grounds that it's expensive and you don't have enough money. Let's save that argument for life necessities like bread, not entertainment.
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.
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The classic case for this is old albums that are out of print. I've pirated them, and then in the cases where they have become available again, I've purchased the official releases. I fail to see anything wrong with that. If the vendor won't sell to me, I don't see why I shouldn't copy.
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This isn't a discussion about copyright. It's about the foolishness of whitewashing bad behavior in the face of stupidity.
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Here's a real example: New Musik's album "Warp". I bought the cassette, because it was all I could find. Then I bought a vinyl LP when I managed to find that, because the cassette was going to wear out and I figured I could tape the LP and listen to the copy. What I really wanted was a CD, but Sony wasn't selling any. So I bought a pirate CD bootleg. I shamelessly indulged in copyright violation. Later, when Sony came out with an official CD, I purchased that. I emphatically deny that my behavior in engaging in copyright violation was bad or immoral.
Here's another real example: Laurie Anderson's "Home of the Brave". Warner own the rights. They do not sell it on DVD, on iTunes, on anything. So I downloaded a pirate copy, as have many other people. If nobody had done so, Laurie Anderson would not have made a penny more in royalties. Nor would Warner have made any more profit. All that would have happened would be that a lot fewer people would have seen the movie. And that's not the purpose of copyright. (Alright, you say, but I could have purchased a VCR and a used copy of the old VHS release and watched that--but that wouldn't have put money in Laurie Anderson's pocket either, and there we're definitely starting to get into the gray area of what constitutes "reasonable".) So again, I reject the characterization of my actions as immoral, and in fact I would defend them to the artist herself. It's not that I'm rationalizing because I don't want to pay; I've got a big stack of (I think) every Laurie Anderson album ever released on CD, all purchased legitimately, that says otherwise.
I get the sense that you are viewing intellectual property as an end in itself, or as an essential good which exists without rationale and should confer right to control, like physical property. If that's the case, then why not eternal copyright? Surely the idea that someone's property eventually becomes owned by the public to do what they like with, is the public having a horrible sense of entitlement?
(I also get the sense that your apparently intense dislike for The Oatmeal may be warping your opinions somewhat.)
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The argument is that copyright is intended to encourage the creation and distribution of artistic works (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause). Locking works away not to be experienced does not encourage their creation or distribution. Copying them when they are not otherwise available does, however, and does not financially harm the creator of the work (since they wouldn't have received money for something you can't pay for anyway).
Clearly paying to experience works is better still, as far as the aims of copyright, but I'm talking about cases where that option is not open. In those cases, I don't see any moral wrongness in copying.
In the case of The Oatmeal, he fell into a gray area where the work was kinda sorta available, but at very high price and a huge amount of inconvenience. But I was more interested in the general case, since you seemed to be making a general statement that it was unacceptable.
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In the general case, it is unacceptable. But as you say, it's a grey area, and downloading a torrent of a movie that was released yesterdy is not in the vicinity of downloading a torrent of an out-of-print Laurie Anderson album. Nearly everyone break laws, regulations, and conventions every day. The matter here is whether we're lying to ourselves or to others about our motivation. I try not to.
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Or is it about breaking the law? Pot smokers are motivated by pure desire too, when they break the law. Should they be ashamed?
It's quite possible that The Oatmeal is lying about his motivations, but I don't have any actual evidence that that's the case, which is why I'm a bit reluctant to grab the pitchfork and light the torch.
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Maybe I could be convinced otherwise, but I'm not optimistic about your chances.
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