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HBO Says Game of Thrones Piracy Is "a Compliment"

Posted by samzenpus on from the piracy-is-is-the-sincerest-form-of-flattery dept.

An anonymous reader writes "HBO programming president Michael Lombardo not only says that illegal downloading of Game of Thrones isn't hurting the show, but goes so far as to say it's 'a compliment' and worries about the image quality of pirated copies"

35 of 447 comments (clear)

  1. No shit by phizi0n · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Finally a suit that understands piracy HELPS more than it hurts, especially when the legal means of consuming the content is limited to few regions of the world.

    1. Re:No shit by jfengel · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The question is whether more piracy would help the show more. He presumably would like somebody to actually pay for what appears to be a fairly expensive show to produce. A little piracy is free advertising; universal piracy kills the bottom line.

      So he may well decide that the current amount of piracy is a boon, but would continue to suppress pirates to the full extent of his ability and the law, to keep it from being any bigger than it is. He could easily eliminate piracy by seeding the torrents himself, and telling everybody that it was OK to take it from there. But I doubt that even this "enlightened" suit will do that, nor would he if he were permitted to.

      I suppose he might try to depend on subscriptions from people who decided they wanted to get it via HBO's regular distribution channels anyway, though it seems unlikely.

    2. Re:No shit by Sarten-X · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Finally a Slashdotter that understands piracy both helps and also hurts, especially when the legal means of consuming the content covers most of the intended market.

      --
      You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
    3. Re:No shit by Entropius · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If there were a way to pay fair market value for a DRM-free recording (meaning: one where I can go mplayer GOT-S1E01.mkv and have it work) of the show, then fewer people would pirate it.

      People pirate it because the only way to watch it legally is to subscribe to HBO. Their business model induces the piracy.

    4. Re:No shit by Dahamma · · Score: 5, Insightful

      People pirate it because the only way to watch it legally is to subscribe to HBO. Their business model induces the piracy.

      Their business model induces piracy about as much as a woman's clothing induces rape. Pirate the show if you want (clearly the harm is much lower/almost non-existant) but don't pretend it's the content owner's fault you did it.

    5. Re:No shit by OrangeTide · · Score: 4, Funny

      Wait. you mean that scale matters? And that you can have too much of a good thing? Say it ain't so!

      Why can't we go back to the good old days when everything was black and white? These varying shades of grey make it hard to use boolean logic in my online debates.

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    6. Re:No shit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      People won't wait, even if you might. This is a fact. Any suggested alternative to piracy must account for that.

    7. Re:No shit by ScentCone · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Their business model induces the piracy.

      No, people who want to have some entertainment on their own terms, without paying for it, "induce" the piracy. No, they don't even "induce," they simply "commit" it. They can't be troubled to wait for a DVD or to grab it through Amazon, etc. No... they have to have it RIGHT NOW, because they are entitled to being entertained by the work of other people who spend millions of dollars.

      Induce. Oh, please.

      Yeah, yeah. And people who wear overpriced basketball shoes in the wrong part of down are inducing other people to shoot them in the head to take them, too. Is this inductive reasoning you're using, here?

      HBO is asking for it, man! Did you see that short skirt that HBO was wearing?

      --
      Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
    8. Re:No shit by ceoyoyo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think you're mixing up observed cause and effect with morality. If you go walking through a bad neighbourhood displaying wealth you might well get attacked whereas if you had kept a lower profile, you wouldn't have. That doesn't make the attacker's actions morally defensible, but it is something that is likely to happen.

      If you take an attractive and seductively dressed woman and dump her into the yard in a male prison during exercise time, she's more likely to get raped than under other circumstances. That doesn't mean the rape is okay or that the prisoners aren't guilty, just that it's more likely to happen. I think the woman would be quite reasonable to put some blame on you for contributing to her rape in that case. Inducing it, if you will.

      Heavily advertising a TV show then not allowing people to watch it by legal means is very likely to increase the rate of piracy. You can argue about whether piracy is morally defensible under those circumstances but your moral arguments have nothing to do about whether or not it's likely to happen. If HBO is creating circumstances under which their show is more likely to be pirated then they are inducing it.

    9. Re:No shit by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 4, Informative

      ...especially when the legal means of consuming the content covers most of the intended market.

      ...after the two/three/four years that it often takes for a top-notch show to reach my country in the first place.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    10. Re:No shit by Endo13 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Uhh, no it's not. You didn't even bother to actually read what you linked.

      Copyright infringement is a civil matter, except in certain specific cases.

      (A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;

      (B) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000; or

      (C) by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution.

      --
      There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
    11. Re:No shit by Chrontius · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I waited.
      Then I forgot Game of Thrones,
      Forgot it got made.

      Now, thus reminded,
      I discovered my life,
      it has not suffered

      for lacking this show,
      and I doubt I'll watch this show,
      until, for five bucks,

      I can get seasons
      in Wal-Mart's $5 DVD bin.
      They have a problem.

      Without the lure of
      Instant gratification,
      They've already lost.

    12. Re:No shit by FuzzNugget · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How about, we all just accept that:

      * A little piracy helps more than it hurts and is a generally nothing more than free advertising
      * Making content easy-to-use, open/DRM-free, accessible and reasonably priced deters piracy better than does antagonizing your own fans through legal bullying ("you'll catch more flies with honey than you will with vinegar")
      * Despite your best efforts, a negligible and inconsequential number of people are going to be freeloaders no matter what. These are people who are either unable to obtain it through "legitimate" means because it's (1) not made available to them, they (2) can't afford it, are (3) simply cheap or are (4) naive.

      There are some sub-points on that third item:

      (1) Unavailabliy: there is no excuse for this. These people are paying customers except that you won't take their money, so they turn to the only possible alternative. If it's unavailable to certain users becuase of their location, that's your own damn fault for keeping everything locked up in bullshit legal entanglements. There is clearly a market and reaching that market is a trivial expense in 2013.
      (2) Can't afford it: don't write these people off. They are in the market, just not yet. These are the same college students that use cracked copies of Photoshop, but who will later be purchasing it at the full ridiculous price from Adobe.
      (3) Just cheap: OK, you probably won't deter these people because they can't be detered. They don't care and it's not worth persuing them and becoming universally despised as a result.
      (4) Naive: they just don't know how these things actually work, they just assume that it's all on the up-and-up and that a computer is just a glorified stereo and VCR. And why wouldn't they? Radio's free, OTA TV is free, YouTube is free... the way to attract them is not to send letters threatening to riun their lives over 24 songs. You tell them, "look, here's the improved level of service and quality we can provide you for a reasonable price."

      In essence, it's a matter of balance and legal bullying is the wrong way to go about tipping the scale when it's too heavy on the side you don't like. It sounds like /maybe/ they're just starting to get the slightest, subtle twinge of this realization.

    13. Re:No shit by aaaaaaargh! · · Score: 4, Interesting

      especially when the legal means of consuming the content covers most of the intended market

      Uh, perhaps they should intend a bit more then?

      Really, this is starting to piss me off. Where I live it is basically impossible to legally watch anything but "America's Next Top Model" and "Extreme Reconstruction" on expensive internet set-top box TV or buy buying decade old series I've already watched on DVD for ridiculously high prizes. No new series, no legal streaming, no working cinema on demand. You can't imagine how gladly I would pay for being able to watch a series or movie on my PC in halfway good quality... in English without subtitles, not synchronized or with letters smeared all over the picture. But no, apparently it's just totally impossible to set up reliable streaming outside the US in a country where just about everyone has a 100Mb fiber optics connection.

    14. Re:No shit by MacGyver2210 · · Score: 4, Informative

      missing out on the cost to distribute it worldwide

      Welcome to the internet: Where video can be shared with everyone, worldwide, regardless of their cable subscription or locale, for pennies.

      Storage/CDN, bandwidth, hosting. Done. Pennies. Also let's not forget a couple ads in the mix can generate them exceedingly more money than they spend to distribute it. Shit, throw a single commercial in the file and upload it to TPB yourself. Then you don't have to pay for bandwidth or hosting, and you make enormous profit for such a widely-viewed commercial.

      --
      If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
    15. Re:No shit by elashish14 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes, but the one invariant is that copyright harms everyone else, with no help to be found. It's responsible for the repeated attempts at crippling the internet, gives us fundamentally broken technologies like DRM, wastes millions of dollars in the legal system, leads to obscenely non-constitutional laws and statutory penalties, thoroughly subverts the democratic process, and serves as the driving factor in several terrible economic/trade policies. In short, it completely sinks legitimate users as well as innocent bystanders, while the jury is out on whether it even serves any real purpose for the proprietors (and it really doesn't appear to at all, once you lose the farcical notion that each pirated copied is one (or hundreds, in the case of Jammie Rasset-Thomas) of lost sales).

      We really need to reconsider our copyright policies. This world can't afford to be held back just because America chooses to sell itself out to moneyed interests.

      --
      I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
    16. Re:No shit by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Copyrights (and patents) harm everyone except those monied interests you mention at the end of your post.

      I could stop right there, with that observation, but there's more to be added.

      These tax schemes with shell corporations in Ireland and the Cayman Islands only work because "client" corporations in America pay the shell corporations all of their profit. The mechanism they use to justify any number and every number they wish to use? Royalties. Copyright and patent royalties. The tax fraud being perpetuated relies on the ability to pay a bogus "licensing fee" to the shell corporation. This number is anything the perpetrator wants it to be, "negotiated" on the spot to whatever is most convenient to enable the fraud. And it's legal.

      Any significant blow to copyright or patents runs the risk of ruining the game, hence copyright and patents must be protected and extended at all costs, population and culture be damned.

      Not to put too fine a point on it but... "Follow the money."

    17. Re:No shit by mjwx · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ...especially when the legal means of consuming the content covers most of the intended market.

      ...after the two/three/four years that it often takes for a top-notch show to reach my country in the first place.

      This,

      Dearest HBO, I'd like to buy Game Of Thrones but you leave no option open to me as an Australian.

      So I end up pirating. It's not that I'm trying to rip HBO off, it's that HBO wont shut up and take my money.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
  2. An ideea by tracius01 · · Score: 5, Funny

    HBO should put top quality torrents on TPB

  3. Awesome by ceoyoyo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'd sign up for HBO if there was a way to do so without paying my cable provider an obscene amount of money for Flip This Nanny and Douchebags Live Together 14 as well.

    Maybe I'll mail them a donation.

    1. Re:Awesome by war4peace · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I was thinking the same. Full digital subscription? Yes, sir. Subscription linked to some shitty cable TV one? Nope.

      --
      ...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
  4. HBO Gets it Right by ohnocitizen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And we should reward them. This is EXACTLY what we want content producers to say. Let's buy the shit out of their DVD's, and publicize the series even more. Let's support companies that take the right stance.

    1. Re:HBO Gets it Right by ohnocitizen · · Score: 5, Insightful

      We should also, in a friendly way, urge them to have their content delivery more closely match the spirit of their PR. If they are OK with piracy that's great! Are they still issuing complaints? Fans would LOVE more ways to pay for their content. Are there viable means for them to make it more available? Fans want the series to make a ton of money, so it continues (and we get more tasty battle sequences). How much more revenue could they secure if they made it easier to purchase? (Relevant).

    2. Re:HBO Gets it Right by dubbreak · · Score: 5, Insightful

      How much more revenue could they secure if they made it easier to purchase? (Relevant).

      Exactly. If he's concerned about image quality, then why not offer downloads that are up to his standards at a price that's so good it's easier to pay it and get a guaranteed good DL.

      Heck, run their own private (pay for) torrent site and they can avoid some bandwidth costs. Or free official torrents with an advert or two at the begining (which they should get some revenue off or).

      There are ways to monetize free viewers. I stream a few shows from the comedy network (Workaholics mainly, since they have the latest episodes) an I don't mind the ad interruptions.

      --
      "If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
  5. Word of Mouth by Mystakaphoros · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Honestly, if it weren't for downloading, I don't think I would have even heard of the show.

  6. Re:Funny that... by war4peace · · Score: 5, Funny

    A 400 MB file? Crappy quality. That's why you received the notification: "stop sharing shitty quality episodes!"

    --
    ...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
  7. And he is right by gweihir · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The difference is that some people actually look at the facts first, like this guy. He is not the first to notice that with a good product aimed at a target audience that can pay does not suffer from unauthorized noncommercial (!) copying, but profits.

    The typical attitude is the greed-inspired "This is ours! They are stealing!", reinforced by stupidity. The fact of the matter is that "copyright" is an artificial construct. The only thing that is an actual natural right is to be identified as the creator of a work. Copyright was introduced in England, because commercial piracy, perpetrated by printers and publishers lead to the actual creator of works not making money anymore. As to whether creators of works should be compensated at all, the time-honored answer is that if the audience liked it, some of them will give. And that has to be enough. It was for countless centuries. Turns out that in the Internet age, it is even easier to find people that are willing to pay for works of art when not forced to. And there are (by now pretty strong) indicators that not forcing people to pay actually increases total revenue for works of good quality. There are also indicators that works of bad quality suffer, and that is the real beef of the copyright fascists: They have gotten so used to be able to force bad quality on people and have them pay-before-consume (an entirely unnatural model for entertainment) that they want to keep that despicable model at all cost.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  8. Re:No money for HBO by mcvos · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Not everybody has access to HBO in the first place.

  9. Buy HBO content on iTunes by SuperKendall · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'd sign up for HBO if there was a way to do so without paying my cable provider

    That's why I buy Game of Thrones on iTunes. HBO gets money, and morally I am justified in downloading shows before they are released on iTunes.

    It's a more direct form of donation as I don't really watch the other HBO content at this time. If they ever did unleash HBO GO to anyone that wanted to pay for it I might subscribe that way.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  10. Re:you can get limned basic and add HBO + HD to it by SighKoPath · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's still giving money to a cable provider for a ton of shit that I'll never watch. No thanks.

  11. Re:They are showing the full S2 on of the free tra by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's not a free trial, it's a free trail. You need to go on Route 66, and make a LEFT turn at Albuquerque.

    Otherwise you end up watching Honey-Boo-Boo.

  12. Is it piracy when I pay the TV tax? by Brobock · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Here in Sweden, I pay a TV tax. This tax goes to paying for state owned TV channels. They broadcast Game of Thrones without commercials. There are no advertisers being hurt, and my TV tax goes to paying HBO for the syndication rights. The issue is I do not like seeing the subtitles that are burned in. I also like my show at the highest resolution with surround sound.

    So is it piracy when I download it rather than watching it directly from syndication?

  13. Re:Think of the Ladies! by Dahamma · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Actually, he does. An analogy is a matching inference or relation, not an equivalency.

    "day : light :: night : dark" doesn't mean day == night.

    Doesn't matter what the illegal activity is, when the person committing it blames the victim it's wrong. Using a hyperbole to make the analogy is a common rhetorical device. Obviously there is no equivalent harm, that's why I said so IN MY POST. Sigh.

  14. Gimme what I want and I'll gladly pay by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't have a problem with paying for the DVDs or the subscription fee to the channel that gives me what I want. What I have a problem with is getting what I want.

    What I want should be easy to do, from a technical point of view: Watch the show in its original makeup. Sadly, it's near impossible to get that here. Because, you see, everything gets dubbed here. Everything. There's a whole industry built around dubbing foreign shows. And considering just how many movies are made domestically, I'd dare say it's bigger than the "real" movie industry. The big problem around it now is that they seem to lump every actor too bad for actual acting and every writer too stupid to actually come up with scripts into it. What this results in is ATROCIOUS dubbing. Scripts the butcher every joke or simply make no sense whatsoever. And wooden voice acting that can actually make you think Keanu Reeves isn't such a bad actor because EVERYONE is about as expressive as he is. Not to mention this unspeakable urge to translate EVERYTHING, which leads to some rather ... odd situations until you finally get to see the original and why something "works". You don't even want to know what they did to "Soft Kitty" from the Big Bang Theory...

    It's also a given that this dubbing takes time. To give you an idea, just recently the 11th Doctor reincarnated.

    So, long story short, I want to watch the shows undubbed. But that's apparently some kind of sacrilege. I must be the heretic for wanting to bypass the "local culture" or something like that. There is exactly NO channel whatsoever, not even one I could subscribe to for extra money, that would present those shows in their original making. So my best bet right now are DVDs, even though I'll have to order them abroad since it's surprisingly hard to find undubbed DVDs or at least some with an original track. Though for some bizarre reason, the sound quality of the original track is by default inferior to the dubbed one.

    So take a wild guess why torrents are so popular around this area.

    Just give people what they want! Most people I know would gladly pay good money for a simple, undubbed version of a show, just broadcast the same content you broadcast in the US and we're very happy.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  15. Bullshit by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Talk about total false equivalence. First not only are they completely different kinds of acts, rape has a real victim, piracy does not, but indeed the business model can very well induce piracy.

    Let me give you an example: I discovered some little French cartoons called Minuscule. It is some funny anthropomorphic 3D rendered insects overlaid on live photography extremely well. I found it charming, and knew my mother would be delighted. That it was French in origin matters not at all as there is no speech, just sound effects. The rights were owned by Disney, by the way.

    So I set out to buy her a DVD for Christmas. It was not for sale, DVD or download, anywhere in the US or Canada. Apparently it has never been redone in NTSC format, it was PAL only. Not a problem, I have the video software necessary to do such a remaster. So I found it in France on their site. No English anywhere, the whole site was in French. With the help of Google, I translate it and give it my info. It is going to be stupid expensive to get, like 10 Euro from the DVD but then 20 Euro to ship it. Fine, I'm ok with that, mom will love it.

    I hit checkout and the first English ever pops up, it says basically "We are not allowed to sell this to your country."

    So fuck them, I pirated it. I went out of my way to buy a copy, far more than was reasonable, and still got shut down. They had decided this "wasn't for the US market" and I wasn't allowed to have it.

    That is what people are talking about. Now Game of Thrones is a somewhat lesser case, but still. To watch it, online or not, you have to have an HBO subscription. To have an HBO subscription you have to have cable TV, and a pretty expensive package at that. The minimum here is $60/month before taxes to get the package needed to have HBO, which is then an additional fee. That's a lot of damn money.

    What if someone does not need or want (and maybe can't afford) cable TV, but would be willing to pay for an HBO subscription, or be willing to pay to get episodes of the show? Nope, sorry, they won't do that. You shell out a ton for cable or you go to hell.

    So it is very realistic to talk about that pushing people to pirate. Compare that to, say, South Park. Here when an episode launches on TV, you can view it free (with ads) online. You can also buy the episodes ala carte at Amazon, or get everything but the most current season as part of a Netflix subscription. They make it very easy to watch it, even if you do not wish to have a cable plan that includes Comedy Central.

    Some people pirate things just because they can, or because they won't pay for anything. However others pirate because getting it legit is very expensive, or perhaps flat out impossible legally.

    You also can't really argue any harm when someone pirates something that they could not buy otherwise. There isn't even any theoretical harm: They could not spend money on it, so there isn't even a theoretical loss.