You know when you, as an exploitative corporate parisite, have lost the PR war? Not when you have to keep pretending the thing you’re complaining about is something it’s not (“piracy”, “theft”) in order to deceive gullible governments into doing your dirty work for you. Not when you find increasing numbers of your potential customers are so sick of being ripped off and prevented from viewing the content you happen to control that they are resorting to other means to obtain it.
It’s when not a single news.com.au reader will come to your defence.
Here’s how stupid the content industry is. If people download a program as it’s broadcast so as not to have it spoiled online, but then buy the bluray the moment it’s released – the content industry thinks it should treat these customers as criminals who should be punished. Rather than customers who want to buy its products at a reasonable time at a reasonable price. It’s an industry granted a temporary monopoly by our elected representatives to distribute certain content and then it refuses to promptly or reasonably distribute it.
Spoiler warning for every single Australian.
In whose interests is that? Certainly not in the interests of the creative people who made the content in the first place. Or the community, whose interest in encouraging creative works that enrich us all is the whole reason the government-enforced temporary copyright monopoly was invented in the first place.
And the public, the broad mass of ordinary voters have, even with the national media doing everything in their power to push the dubious lines of the parasites, noticed. And are angry.
No wonder the copyright parasites have to lobby our governments in secret, and our governments have to bury the anti-consumer laws they’re passing on their behalf so that voters don’t realise until it’s too late.
Moved On 
Given that Australian audiences have a number of options to legally view episodes of game of thrones series 2, including pay tv and through iTunes, I find it difficult to believe that even a small proportion of the 300,000 or so people who are illegally downloading this show will go out and buy the DVD when it is released.
Pay TV is scarcely a reasonably priced option, especially considering Game of Thrones requires some sort of add-on package, or so I have heard. What I would like to see, though, is some evidence to support the assertion that pirates are going to go out and buy the DVD when it’s released? Why would they? They have a infinitely more convenient format already, and only the hardcore GoT nerds are going to blow ~$40 on an overpriced boxset in order to view special features, I’d imagine.
Aren’t Foxtel and iTunes an episode behind? And isn’t Foxtel at least $50 a month? And iTunes charges $3 for a low-res digital copy of an episode?
I suspect your theory about Australians who downloaded the program not buying it in physical media when they became available might be contradicted by comparing sales for the Season 1 bluray and DVD with either of the two delayed low-def versions.
PS Say hi to Timmy for me, when you’ve finished trawling through my blog archives.
cricketninja, in an age where a funny cat video on YouTube can go viral all over the world in less than an hour, it is ten thousand kinds of stupid for the TV networks to make their customers wait six months, one month, or even a day to access a TV show that has already been broadcast overseas. Put a credit card payment link on the web site and just make it available already!
I have Foxtel, and it is a very expensive way to get SciFi, the odd Fox8 show, and a movie now and then. If I could build a virtual TV channel out of the shows I actually wanted to watch, and only pay for that, I’d switch in a heartbeat. Right now I’m paying for GoT in my package – yet I don’t watch it at all.
Region locking and timed releases are dinosaur business models. The pirates give the customers what they want, when they want it. The TV networks and studios refuse even though there is no technical impediment to creating per-person virtual TV channels, or any other kind of click-to-pay-and-view distribution models.