I call bullsh*t
by Jonathon Oake
[Disclosure: I work for Warner Bros and so share a parent company with HBO. In addition my company distributes HBO content in Australia]
I’ve seen this comic from The Oatmeal passed around a lot in the last couple of days:
The essence of it is that Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman was plunged into a moral quandary when he realised there was no legitimate way he could legally watch Game of Thrones (apart, that is, from paying a subscription to HBO, the show’s creators, which for some reason he didn’t fancy).
As the always-hilarious Mike Masnick from Techdirt opined, this comic demonstrated yet again that “the biggest driver of piracy is a lack of legitimate offerings”. This has become something of a refrain over the past few years when discussing copyright infringement on the internet: people ‘want to pay’, they really do, but the legal channels just aren’t there. It’s a distribution problem, not a legal problem.
Rubbish. I’m a big believer in Occam’s Razor, in that the simplest explanation is probably the correct one. The biggest driver of copyright infringement is that, if given a choice, people would prefer to get something for free. It’s the free rider problem in full effect – the same reason no-one pays tax in Greece – if you can get away with something, most people will try. It’s hardly rocket science.
Simplest explanation? I’d say it’s more about the simplest method.
I buy songs, books, etc through iTunes because it’s *easy* – just click on it, enter my password, and I’ve got it.
Credit card debited automatically, content available to sync or download to all my devices.
Pirating becomes hard work in comparison.
So my take is that it’s not so much people wanting stuff for free as wanting stuff with no effort.
Fair point regarding HBO option, but I think the cartoonist makes the point that an HBO subscription requires one to pay for the whole bundle of HBO content, plus a bundle of unrelated cable channels… Not exactly a simple, transparent offering to the consumer.
No doubt true, and a good reason for not buying a HBO sub. However, not a good reason for infringing the copyright.
Fair point regarding HBO oipton, but I think the cartoonist makes the point that an HBO subscription requires one to pay for the whole bundle of HBO content, plus a bundle of unrelated cable channels Not exactly a simple, transparent offering to the consumer.