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

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

Well, Dan Savage would say yes, so that's clearly open to reasonable debate too. If you can't give your partner something they want in a relationship, then generally yes, it's reasonable to expect them to get it elsewhere.

For example, I just can't get excited about going shoe shopping. If my wife wants to go shoe shopping with someone else as a result, that's fine with me. This is the general case; things get different with sex because people are weird about sex. I don't think it's particularly useful to analogize between copyright and sex for that reason.

(Though I remember an old posting about RMS's Free Sex Foundation that was pretty amusing.)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

In fact, Dan Savage would not say yes, unless you both agreed to it first; otherwise, you're a CPOS. As you say, you're fine with your wife going shoe shopping with someone else. HBO, however, is not fine with you downloading GoT.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

You've got a contract with your wife, both explicitly in the terms of your marriage, and implicitly, in the mutually-agreed-upon terms of your probably monogamous sex-life.

With HBO, you don't have a contract. So you're not breaking a contract when you cheat on HBO. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying it's a bad analogy.

Also, the comic shows that even if HBO was a bit more forthcoming about the release of GoT on DVD and BluRay, perhaps that would be a satisfactory wait. For all we know, HBO is going to do a Disney thing and release the BluRay disks for 5 minutes every 10 years. Assuming he's bring truthful, the writer made heroic efforts to get the show legitimately, from the many outlets at which the show will one day be available, outside of the one thing that HBO's model counts on: that GoT is its Killer App and by fantasy nerds and boobie fanatics no choice (so it thinks) between SUBSCIRBing to cable + HBO, and waiting in limbo for an unknowable eternity. The problem for HBO is that you're not just out the HBO fee, you're out the cost of cable that more and more people don't have. And whammo, you've got a $40-140 bill every month for the duration of some commitment because you wanted to see Peter Dinklage fight with a sword. Worth lots, but not that much.