Once again, as the Game of Thrones season gets rolling along, HBO is going around doing their best to Hodor smash all the illegal activity around it. As we reported earlier this month, piracy numbers are way down this year for the program, after an unnaturally high number last year , post screener leak of the first four episodes. But “down” for Game of Thrones means in the low millions, which is still way higher than just about anybody else. And to that end, HBO has once again begun their flurry of takedown notices to piracy sites.
According to TorrentFreak, HBO has been sending takedown notices via their anti-piracy partner IP Echelon to ISP companies, urging them them to contact the subscribers who are uploading/downloading the episodes, and “take the proper steps to prevent further downloading or sharing of unauthorized content and additional infringement notices.” What is unusual about the takedown notices that HBO is asking the ISPs to send is that it openly encourages subscribers to please watch the show through legal means,. a rare request in this sort of warning.
Whether or not the HBO warnings will actually be sent out to those individual user with the identified IPs in question is not clear at this time, but sites like BitTorrent and Kickass Torrents have been complying well enough, taking down the episodes from their websites, sometimes in a matter of minutes, as noted by the 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 piracy of Game of Thrones.)
Meanwhile, in that 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 the mysterious Spanish source who has been posting a spoken rundown of the forthcoming Season 6 episode about 48 hours before it airs. The YouTuber, who was removed from the service last weekend, just after posting all of the spoilers for the third episode, has been identified only as Dr. Jose Senaris, and swears it is not him who sees the episode and spoils it. Instead he says he is getting an email 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 what reporting on 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.
Via http://winteriscoming.net/2016/05/12/hbo-cracking-down-on-game-of-thrones-piracy-and-spoilers/
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