HBO Cracking Down on Game of Thrones Piracy and Spoilers
By Ani Bundel
As the new Game of Thrones season gets rolling along, HBO is doing its best to smash all the illegal activity surrounding it. As we reported earlier this month, piracy numbers for the program are way down from last year, when screeners of the first four episodes leaked ahead of time. But “down” for Game of Thrones means numbers in the low millions, which is still way higher than just about every other show. To that end, HBO has sent a flurry of takedown notices.
According to TorrentFreak, HBO has been sending notices to ISPs via its anti-piracy partner IP Echelon, urging them to contact the subscribers who are uploading/downloading Season 6 episodes, and to “take the proper steps to prevent further downloading or sharing of unauthorized content and additional infringement notices.” What’s unusual about the notices is that they openly encourages subscribers to watch the show through legal means, a rare request in this sort of context.
Whether or not the HBO warnings will actually be sent out to those individual user with the identified IP addresses in question is not clear at this time, but sites like BitTorrent and Kickass Torrents have been complying well enough, taking down episodes from their websites, sometimes in a matter of minutes, as noted by Australian site SMH. (Australia, due to the unavailability of HBO Now and the outlandishly high prices of Foxtel, the pay channel that has the rights to air HBO first run content, has some of the highest instances of Game of Thrones piracy in the world.)
Meanwhile, regarding the other major problem HBO has had this year—that of spoilers getting out prior to the episode airing—IGN is reporting that HBO may decide to prosecute a man who has been posting a spoken rundown of each forthcoming Season 6 episode on YouTube about 48 hours before it airs. The man, who’s been describing each episode in Spanish, identifies as Dr. Jose Senaris. In a Reddit post, he said he does not know when he’ll receive new information—he just gets occasional emails from a source he does not identify.
IGN says that’s not enough cover, and that he could be sued for criminal copyright infringement by HBO. If so, it would be the first case of it’s kind to make headlines. It could also help define when reporting on the plot of a show is or isn’t legal, as well as determine the legality of the grey area known as “spoilers” that has sprung up these last few decades as the internet makes information easier to disseminate around the world.