How is it illegal to download something that has been broadcast for free on TV? If I happened to record it from its original broadcast, is it illegal for me to have you visit and show it to you over tea and crumpets? We should really all relax a bit over what's legal or not (and whom those laws actually benefit).

Also, on topic, didn't watch the show, but just finished reading the books (those published so far). Quite hooked, although I must say you kinda get used to the storytelling over time and it loses its ability to surprise you. Still a pretty interesting read, looking forward to the next book, and really hoping the guy doesn't die on us.

And here i thought Star Trek and Doctor Who was the most overrated series. :P

MASH is frequently repeated here. Same with Friends, Cheers, and other sitcoms series.

It aired here in Romania on the exact same day it did in the US, so...

It's not broadcast for free on TV. If you didn't pay to have the TV channels so you could potentially watch it for 'free', then it's illegal. Basically, if you just jump to a torrent without paying for the right to see it, then yeah, it's not legal.
No, because you paid for the tv access to the programming.

Meh, I'm not waiting a week for an episode that's been broadcast in America.

The airing times of season 1 for a couple of other interesting countries:

France - 49 days after US
Australia - 91 days after US
India - 133 days after US
Russia - 144 days after US
Turkey - 154 days after US
Germany - 168 days after US
Italy - 177 days after US
Netherlands - 271 days after US

http://winteriscoming.net/features/international-airings/
Do however you wish, but don't complain about stupid DRM and region locks when you happily download stuff illegaly.
What I said to Chandoraa...

I watched rest of the season 1, and the first episode of season 2. It got somewhat more interesting (I admit I was even surprised by one death). Maybe I'll keep watching it, but there is no big drive for me to do it. I have a bit lukewarm feeling towards it: it isn't a bad show and it is very professionally done, but it isn't terribly good or exciting show either for me. Still it perplexes me that it has a 9.5 score on IMDB, so some people obviously love it. I don't recall other shows or movies getting that high scores in IMDB.

My wife seems to find it interesting though, but her attention span is maybe too short to grasp everything that happens on the screen, as she is half of the time looking at Facebook on her phone. Then I have to explain later to her why someone is angry to someone else etc. :)

Not disagreeing with you for being illegal to obtain it for free from torrent sites, but just an interesting tidbit that here in Finland they've been actually airing Game of Thrones on the free(*) national TV stations (YLE), even in HD quality. When the first season was aired back in early 2012, I first mistook it for Tudors (which had been running earlier and which I didn't watch either).

When I later learned about the hype for the show, I think they were already showing season 2 or so here so I decided not to jump in in the middle of it. Now that they aired it from the start fast, I was happy I didn't because I would probably have been overly confused over all the characters and their relationships (just like my wife is now).

(*)"Free" in the sense that it is not a pay channel, but we all have to pay for the YLE channels in our taxes. So it is free in a same sense as a public school or hospital is free.

You're right of course. But I've literally had times I had to wait for months for a single episode.
I would love to buy DVD's except they tend to rip out all subtitles and just put in dutch ones.

I wasn't talking about this specific case (although Game of Thrones has been broadcast in Spanish non-paid TV, if I'm not mistaken). But if we agree I can legally have Real.geizterfahr watch my legally recorded latest episode of [Insert show name here], why shouldn't it be legal for me to make a torrent for that same recorded episode so that anyone in the internets can watch it as well?

The whole point I'm trying to make here is: some people are trying really hard to convince us all that some actions (which so happen to allegedly hurt their business) are illegal, hateful and undoubtably wrong, when they're, if anything, ambiguous. I'm not pushing a pro-piracy or anti-piracy agenda here, I'm just trying to be pro-common sense. I've seen cassette, VCR and CD recorders come and go, and the perception of what was legal, illegal, or something in between, has been shifting as well. A lot of what is legal is actually unfair and/or immoral. I guess it will be good for all of us if we stop and think twice before crying foul, is all I'm saying.

The MIAA/MPAA would have you convinced loaning your trilogy of Lord of the Rings to your friend or neighbor equals lost sales, and because of that friends watching movies together or having a family of 4 all watching the movies on their own over a period of a month would equal them losing over a thousand dollars per person, even if they made that money while you didn't have your TV actively tuned to a particular station that day with the trilogy on to justify having paid for the programming for that year.

I'm sure if it was an option, DVD's, VCR's, and even computers would stand up as well as chocolate in a warm room so you have to buy it again each time you want to view it. Or at a worse option, having it encrypted and tied to your DNA so only you can decode it while your finger is jammed into this needle that confirms you are actively sitting at the chair watching the thing on a headset VR that can't share with anyone while wearing headsets so it's family friendly and you aren't disturbing your neighbors with your 'premium content', which is used in the same context as porn in a hotel which they gouge you $30 to view a 1 hour segment of people being paid to perform sex.

Actually that was part of XBone's plan with facial recognition. The idea was to 'personalize' the experience, when in reality it would be used most likely to target advertising or locking the console unless you forked over more money per unregistered person.

Didn't really take much seeing the 10:1 ratio of people ordering PS4's to make them change their mind.


edit: Although thinking about it, it would be great for spying with the police/FBI since they could look for facial recognition against a list of criminals or people who have warrants and then send police to arrest you while watching a movie, porn or playing a game... Be quite annoying...

Why would you waste the time to download it when you can just watch it online?

1) Bandwidth. Not everyone has T1-line level of downloading
2) Download Caps. Some people only get 2Gigs a month or something.
3) Quality control. This goes back to 1 & 2, since you can say you are happy with 480p rather than being forced to 1080i for 4 minutes of video before your download cap is hit.
4) Inturrupted Service. A while back a lot more YouTube happily stops in the middle of a video like having a heart attack. When it's on the local computer, that issue goes away.
5) Rewatching/Rewinding ability. Quite often if you skip forward, go back, or something it starts the entire download over at whatever point it believes you were watching, even if it was about 6 seconds ago, and redownloads the whole thing. And if you enjoyed something and wanted to show it to your girlfriend or something, you redownload it when it's online.
6) Availability. Sometimes what's online gets taken down, then it's gone. Just gone... You might get a frowny face saying it's gone, or it may say it was never there in the first place.
7) Courses. I've downloaded 2 hour courses that are like 50Mb talking about technology, or writing or whatever. Take them with you on the go and watch them while driving when there's no internet connectivity. 1Gig of low quality courses can give you a week or two worth of education.

I'm sure there's plenty of other useful reasons to put down, but these are all good ones.

Seriously?

While I agree that this show, for one reason or another, ain't the best out there, it certainly is one of the best shows out there.
You obviously should like fantasy, politics, sex (yeah, right) and violence (a reasonable amount for the setting) to a certain degree, but who doesn't?