Hollywood would really like to have all sorts of extra tools, like SOPA and PIPA, to go with their colonization of the Justice department in the desperate pursuit of eradicating illegal content online.

For a whole host of reasons, that’s just not going to happen. People HAVE to be able to decrypt movies and music in order to watch them, and once they’re decrypted people will make copies. They’ll make backups, because media — either CD/DVD or hard drives — fails. They’ll transcode movies to watch on their phones and tablets. They’ll do these things because they should be able to do them, even though the MPAA would prefer it if you needed to re-buy your movies over and over in order to enjoy them on your TV, on your computer, and on your portable device.

Hollywood’s biggest problem isn’t piracy. Hollywood’s biggest problem is their own inability to treat their customers with anything other than contempt. Endless attempts to cash in at any point — like Sony’s move to jerk The Bodyguard off streaming services this week, because people will want to watch Whitney and maybe they can be convinced to BUY A BLU RAY instead — make it abundantly clear what they think of us, but one more excellent example is the ongoing usage of “release windows.”

The term describes the process of allowing properties to be available in certain ways only at certain times — maybe a movie is on Netflix for a while, but they’ll pull it off and flood the zone with BluRays if there’s a sequel coming, for example. And with television properties, the windowing rarely makes any sense at all.

Case in point, and the whole reason I’m writing this post, is what happened when the author of the Oatmeal tried to watch Game of Thrones. It’s very, very similar to what happened when Mrs Heathen and I tried to catch up on Battlestar Galactica before the final season was available. It beggars belief, really, that they make it this hard to give them money.