HBO Has Sent “Thousands” Of Warnings To ‘Game Of Thrones’ Pirates, So Is Australia Next?
Arrr, me hearties—oh wait, not that kind.
If you pirate Game of Thrones—and we don’t suggest that you do, no sir—you might have noticed that it’s a little harder to find this year. This may be because HBO has reportedly sent out “thousands” of copyright infringement notices in what TorrentFreaks claims is a huge crackdown on torrent-users. HBO has also been more vigilant in taking down individual downloads from popular file-sharing sites like KickassTorrents.
TorrentFreaks writes: “The company has been sending cease-and-desist letters to suspected pirates, along with warnings to torrent sites requesting them to remove all torrents of the show”.
Everything is fine, nothing to see here.
This seems like a familiar story. Every year we hear that HBO or Foxtel are employing stricter measures to deal with piracy and that, being some of the biggest culprits in the world, Australia will be hit hardest. In Australia, the law around this is still a little murky. Last year the Federal Court succeeded in getting some internet service providers to hand over the names of customers who torrented Dallas Buyers Club (nothing ended up happening, but they got that far). Foxtel has filed legal action against some torrenting sites this year, but there hasn’t been any indication that they won’t go after individual pirates as well.
Game of Thrones is at the centre of this discussion in Australia because it seems to speak to a wider issue of distribution in this country. Foxtel attempted to make this easier by showing episodes at the same time that they air in the U.S. (Monday morning our time) but it’s unclear if this has made an impact.
In a piece called “Why I Refuse To Feel Guilty For Torrenting Game Of Thrones“ writer Mark Serrells claims that while he wants to pay for the show, its removal from iTunes, Australia being geo-blocked for HBO Go and the high-price, low-quality option of Foxtel Play made paying for Game of Thrones almost impossible.
“The headlines and the stories are predictable. The day after the first episode of a new Game of Thrones season: Australians pirate in record numbers. Australia is a nation of pirates. Australia has a piracy problem,” he writes. “Australia doesn’t have a piracy problem. Australia has a distribution problem. More specifically: Australia has a Foxtel problem.”
Australia’s copyright laws haven’t changed but stay tuned: you never know when your dodgy internet history may be used against you. We already know that piracy is wrong and that we’re not meant to be doing it. It’ll be interesting to see how Foxtel and HBO will manage to dissuade Australians from even considering it in the first place.