| The question is: Is the payoff worth it, considering that entire countries are currently "conditioned" to obtain Game of Thrones by illegal means? Many people speak of Australia, but take Germany as another extreme example. HBO doesn't offer its services here so there are only two options if you want to watch Game of Thrones: 1: Get a subscription of Sky, which is mostly sports and has a minimum subscription time of 2 years. So if you're not into sports, that's about 800$ for two seasons of Game of Thrones. 2: Wait one year and then buy the DVD, because it will be available exactly one year later. The thing about culture, though, is that you can't participate in the phenomenon that is happening _now_ if you have to wait a year. So everybody here is pirating it like crazy. Curiously enough, Germany never appears in the piracy statistics because due to some weird legal specialties here, your chance of getting caught when using Bittorrent are 100%. All the non-tech people I talk to watch it using sketchy streaming sites, thus generating advertising revenue for criminals and infecting their Windows boxen with malware. I don't know what the long-run consequences are, but they can't be good. |