The first four episodes of this season of Game of Thrones have been leaked and illegally downloaded by millions of users, and HBO is officially taking action against those involved in the piracy.
According to TorrentFreak, HBO is instructing Internet providers to send out warnings to users who are illegally downloading Game of Thrones episodes. HBO requests that the providers "take appropriate action against the account holder under your Abuse Policy/Terms of Service Agreement," which in some cases could include disconnecting accounts.
Of course, this is more just a warning to freak out users and deter them from continuing their piracy, as HBO doesn't actually have information about the pirates and so there aren't any legal implications. But as is usually the case with these types of issues, the network hopes that getting a threatening notice from their service provider will deter a fair amount from pirating any further content.
HBO's notice does not apply to users who downloaded the episodes while using VPN services to change their IP address. This also doesn't take into account the users who have watched the episodes illegally on streaming services.
This has already become one of the most prominent cases of illegal piracy in recent history. The first four episodes of the show's fifth season apparently leaked from a review screener, hitting torrenting services before the show's premiere. Within 18 hours, the first four episodes had been download over one million times, as we previously reported.
However, despite the historically large leak, it's not all bad news for HBO. Even though the first episode was already on the Internet before it aired, the Season 5 premiere still brought in 8 million viewers, a new record for the network.
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