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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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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.
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The HBO outlier may be common to most (all?) cable channels, but not to all content in general. The cable channels want to sell you the cable channel. ABC doesn't need to sell you the ABC channel; Universal Pictures doesn't need to sell you the Universal Pictures theater subscription.
Here are some ACTUALLY analogous cases to the HBO case: you have to buy the entire Time magazine to own one Time article; you have to buy the entire newspaper to own one newspaper article; you have to buy the whole CD to own one song--oh wait, they fixed that one.
The region fiasco is an entirely separate issue.
Anyway, there are two different issues here: The Oatmeal's pandering, and people's entitlement issues (that justify it being "moral" to download a copy if they can't acquire one legitimately). I'm only speaking to the first, but of course your complaint about Discovery's documentary is exactly the second issue that rone is tackling. And speaking to the first, individual counter-examples don't change the fact that the Oatmeal is cherry-picking a worst case, and the complaint I'm making is that everyone is lauding the Oatmeal comic as if it were reflective of the typical case when it's not, it's a worst case (as is, it sounds like, Earthflight). If you went through the typical case -- take the top 100 shows torrented on piratebay or something -- you would not find the vast majority of them so inaccessible (except for region issues, which as I said, is its own can of worms).
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I quite agree that the vast majority of copying is people who are too cheap to pay for stuff. But if you look at music piracy, that's died down a hell of a lot since iTunes and the Amazon MP3 store. The piracy that remains there is a pricing problem (http://blog.mises.org/16042/media-piracy-better-described-as-a-global-pricing-problem/).