The premiere of the fourth season of HBO’s Game of Thrones didn’t just overwhelm the network's TV Everywhere app. It was also a massive magnet for pirates.
Sunday night’s premiere set new records for digitally pilfered versions of the episode, reported TorrentFreak, a site focused on file-sharing and privacy and copyright issues.
According to TorrentFreak, more than 1 million illegal copies were downloaded in just half a day. At its height this morning, more than 300,000 BitTorrent users were sharing the new episode, the site said.
TorrentFreak pinned part of the piracy craze on HBO Go’s temporary outage Sunday night, noting that it “probably motivated some to look for unauthorized copies, which were widely available through dozens of torrent sites soon after the episode finished. Unlike HBO Go, downloads via BitTorrent actually benefit from the increased interest, which usually means that downloads finish faster.”
