Quote:
Originally Posted by ST-One
I downloaded all of last year's Doctor Who episodes the same evening they were broadcast in Britain simply because they weren't available in Germany (I even got the 50th anniversary special even though I was lucky enough to have watched it in the cinema); but this didn't stop me from paying the BBC-inflated prices for the BluRay discs.
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It's what I did with TV shows back when I still watched stuff. Yes, I'm not
entitled to immediate access of something, but since I live in a global world, and have friends all over the world - friends who watch the same shows, live - and would really like to be able to participate in discussions, to have the right to not stumble across spoilers (difficult if not impossible to avoid for many things if you use any social media at all), and all that, I didn't find it particularly immoral to download and watch immediately and then buy & import the DVDs later, once they became available.
I still have boxes upon boxes of shrinkwrapped DVDs in my shelf that I never plan to watch, bought just because I felt that was the right thing to do.
As someone who doesn't live in a major market and therefore gets basically no legal access to anything directly (without months of waiting and then importing at a high cost), while I acknowledge I'm not entitled to anything, I admit I find it rather uncomfortable whenever people in large markets discuss this in these terms - it comes off a lot like "that rabble over there doesn't need all these things we take for granted; it's not one of life's bare necessities, so they can go without". Even when I'm quite sure it's not meant as such.
It was much easier to deal with this before the days of the Internet - yes, we still didn't have access to all those things, but it wasn't a problem in the way it is now: if no one you know has access to those things, the problems of wanting to participate, not having to fear spoilers, and other such issues don't exist.
I'd have gladly paid for a chance for immediate / near-immediate online access to the things I wanted to watch back then, instead of accumulating physical media that I don't want. These days I just opt to not watch anything instead, because I really can't afford to cram even more DVDs to a space I don't have for them. At least iTunes is now cautiously selling/renting
some movies even to us, even if the selection is still very tiny, so there's hope for the future.