In reply to Franklin Delano Jesse.

Jesse, I think it's pretty disingenuous to complain about straw men when you seem to have little problem engaging in little apart from ad hominems. Instead of engaging my post, you dismissed it as "scolding." Instead of responding to my comment, you accused me of putting words into your mouth. And instead of addressing any of the points asked in my or John Welch's response, you've said basically "you don't have to be rude!" and dropped the mike and stormed off stage.

This comment board just isn't set up for My Dinner With Andre style conversations, for better or worse. You pretty much have to make your point in the space available. What you're calling straw men, I'm calling genuine attempts to glean what your argument is, so that we can respond to it.

So once again: you appear to be saying that the "pirating masses" are a potential untapped market. And you have said that a post like Siegler's gets closer to putting the pirate's money in the hands of HBO, while a post like mine sends a message for HBO to stay the course.

You ignored my point that HBO execs aren't reading my post, or even Siegler's. There is a higher likelihood — still tiny based on the traffic of this blog, but higher — that the people pirating content are reading this blog. As evidence, I present the fact that people are jumping in to defend piracy.

So how do you "convert" this potential market into paying for what they consume? Do you paint a picture of HBO as this money-hungry faceless corporation engaged in shady deals with cable/satellite providers, so engorged on profits and so out of touch with modern technology that they've created a situation where the only recourse is to steal from them?

Or do you remind people that the stuff they watch has a real cost? And remind people that there whenever they pirate something, there are other people out there paying that cost for them? Please, explain to me how one helps bring these markets together and the other doesn't.

Say I were an HBO exec, and I could choose to cater to two markets: one that has shown they're willing to pay me to watch well-produced programming; and another that has said they will pay me if my price is unreasonably low, and otherwise they have no problem stealing from me. Which one of those am I going to be eager to do business with?

If people really want to send a message to HBO:
http://www.hbo.com/#/about/contact-us.html

Anything other than that is empty talk. If a person can't make his argument, or enter into a business transaction, without threatening to steal from the other party, then what does the other party possibly have to gain by doing business with them?