An interesting thing happened to me recently: I turned to a life of crime. It may seem odd to mention it so very casually, but in truth that was how it happened – casually.
My crime, which I confess freely and without duress, was the theft of intellectual property. To wit: Season Two, Episode 22 of the TV series “Person Of Interest”. An episode portentously entitled “God Mode”. I have no doubt that, come Judgment Day, I shall be weighed in the balance and found wanting after my gross transgression but, before you also rush to judge me, please allow me to explain. Not to exonerate myself, of course – my guilt is beyond doubt and I will not hold it against you at all should you feel it is your moral imperative to report me to any and all relevant authorities – but merely to explain.
My sorry tale begins, as so many sorry tales do, in a state of blissful innocence. As a creator of content, and someone who relies for my own living on the salability of intellectual property, I have for the most part been on the side of copyright holders in their ongoing struggle against those who would liberate their work without payment. I’m not keen on onerous restrictions and have railed against such things as region coding on DVDs, copy-protection on CDs and DRM on digital downloads – if you buy a thing, you ought to be able to use it how you want, within reasonable limits. As long as someone gets paid for what they made.
A while ago, I encountered an episode of the above-mentioned TV series, quite by accident, and found that I enjoyed it. The episode I had seen was from the second season of the show, though, so I needed to catch up. Thankfully, it’s available for legal download from the iTunes Store, and so I proceeded like a good digital citizen to download the first season. Legally. In exchange for currency and all.
By the time I’d caught up on the first season, more episodes of the second season had aired. Channel Nine makes episodes available on iTunes right after they air, so again I went to iTunes and I purchased the second-season episodes I had missed. Even when I had caught up and could watch the episodes for free on TV (albeit with ads) I continued to buy them from iTunes as well. It’s a collector thing – my OCD abhors an incomplete set.
Then came the cliffhanger penultimate episode of season two, “Zero Day”. What a finish! I was on the edge of my seat! Could not wait until the following week!
Except that the following week, Nine played a rerun from earlier in the season. And the week after that. And the week after that. In fact, as I write this, it is Nine’s intention to replay most of the last half of the season before playing that one more episode. Madness.
I phoned Nine, and was told that they want to “give viewers a chance to catch up”. Here’s a thing: viewers are caught up. The people who need to catch up are not viewers. They haven’t been viewing — thus the name. Should they desire to catch up and become a viewer, they have the same option I did: legal downloads from iTunes.
I tried to find a legal avenue for downloading the episode. There is none.
I tried to find a quasi-legal avenue, by looking in various international iTunes Stores. No luck.
In desperation, I sought non-legal methods. Here is where the story gets a little bit embarrassing because, having been such a babe in the woods for so long, I actually didn’t have a good grasp on how to go about this whole BitTorrent thing. I found a lot of sites that pretended to have the episode to download, but in fact were trying to trick me into handing over credit cards or signing up for mobile phone spam. If I’ve made the decision to obtain a thing without paying its rightful owner, I’m sure as cheese not going to pay some scammer who’s stolen it. I have my limits.
So I asked my friends, many of them also content creators and in the intellectual-property business themselves, for advice. Gentle reader, let me tell you: I was stunned by the response. Within a very short time I knew several different non-scamming avenues by which I could get the episode. I watched it that very night, Channel Nine be damned.
When it is available for legal download, I will download it legally, and pay for it. Partly to appease my conscience and partly because the pirated version has a logo for some Canadian TV station watermarked on it.
What I won’t do is watch it on Channel Nine again. The only reason it’s not available on iTunes for me to pay for and download legally right now is because Nine is stopping it. Nine is denying the producers of the show their rightful income so that it can wring a few more advertising dollars out of episodes it has already shown. And if I can’t pay the rightful owner, I’m sure as cheese not going to support a scammer.
I have my limits.
Matthew JC. Powell has only ever watched Game Of Thrones legally. Tell him he’s missing out on half the fun on mjcp@me.com
-1.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&w=100&c=1&s=0)
