Like any real American, I know deep down that, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, our great nation’s legal system is designed exclusively to cater to my personal needs and wants. For this reason, I think we can agree that this whole SOPA and PIPA debate really just boiled down to me and my need to watch episodes of Downton Abbey whenever I see fit to do so.
Like so many others (including the Full Stop editors), I developed an unhealthy attachment to the glorified soap opera (whatever, it’s Masterpiece Theatre!) after watching the entirety of Season 1 over the course of a single, hermetic weekend. It goes without saying that this came courtesy of Netflix Instant, a perfect model of American ingenuity and gratuitous convenience if ever there was one.
It also goes without saying that I expected to continue my torrid affair with the Crawley family’s torrid affairs uninterrupted. This is where I hit a wall. As you may know, Downton aired on ITV in the UK before being picked up for re-broadcast by PBS (and Netflix). Even after Season 1’s hugely popular U.S. run, Season 2 is still coming to us on a delay, meaning that while British viewers had finished the whole thing by Christmas, PBS only just start airing the new episodes.
Aside from the obvious problem of the British getting what they want before I do — uh, have we forgotten why America was founded in the first place? — this also means it’s basically impossible to read any article about the show without seeing a spoiler about who lives, who dies, or who marries whom. Lame.
So, after accidentally reading the biggest plot point of the entire season in an article I thought was just about two of the cast members working on a terrible album together (that’s a topic for a different post), I retreated to my usual rotation of poorly designed bootleg streaming sites and watched the whole thing as quickly as possible, with only minor interruptions from unseen pop-up ads, mostly naked girls who are dying to live chat me, and seventy-two-minutes-at-a-time viewing limits.
Inconvenient, but so worth the hassle. If the buzzkills behind SOPA had gotten their way, though, I would still. be. waiting. Worse, I might actually have to “buy a TV” or “pay for service.” If piracy is what it takes to keep Americans up to speed with (and hopefully ahead of) the rest of the world, then how could we justify cracking down on such a patriotic industry?
We seem to be out of the woods with these bills for the time being, but we still have to stay vigilant to keep it that way. After all, it does not say “delayed gratification” on the Statue of Liberty.
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