TorrentFreak

U.S. Ambassador to Australia Jeffrey L. Bleich is back once again with a new Internet piracy missive. The long-time friend of Barack Obama caused controversy by getting involved in the Game of Thrones download debate last month, but now believes that he hasn’t got involved enough. Quoting the earlier words of HBO, Bleich says that if online piracy is a compliment to Game of Thrones, then the same holds true for illegal immigration or someone hitting on your partner.

Just when the Game of Thrones file-sharing controversy had begun settling into the background, the most senior figure yet has weighed in on the debate. Marking UN World Book and Copyright Day and citing TorrentFreak stats to on how many times the show has been downloaded, the U.S. Ambassador to Australia has pleaded with Aussies to stop making excuses and “do the right thing” by paying for Game of Thrones.

As Game of Thrones smashes download records this week, an extra act of sharing will soon come from a most unusual source. Sick and tired of the poor quality offered by HBO’s official streaming service, the director of movie Iron Sky says he’s going to take retaliatory action. Complaining about their delivery the Finnish director told HBO that their service “sucks” so in future he’ll download the show from The Pirate Bay.

With a million downloads on BitTorrent in less than a day, the season premiere of Game of Thrones is breaking records on multiple fronts. Never before has there been a torrent with so many people sharing a file at the same time, more than 160,000 simultaneous peers. Data gathered by TorrentFreak further shows that Australia has the highest piracy rate of the popular download destinations, while London tops the list of pirate cities.

Last month the director of Game of Thrones admitted something that his paymasters had HBO might have avoided. Huge online piracy doesn’t hurt the show, he said, and in fact might create benefits by generating cultural buzz. Well check the date if you like folks but the following is absolutely genuine. HBO programming president Michael Lombardo has just announced that not only is the huge piracy a compliment, but the phenomenon hasn’t hurt DVD sales at all.

Last week Game of Thrones director David Petrarca said that piracy isn’t hurting his show, and that it may actually help to build an audience. Several of the show’s actors, on the other hand, have a more negative view towards piracy and equate it to stealing. HBO is not amused either and the TV-network has a plan to counter piracy in 2013. Will it be good enough?

With millions of downloads per episode Game of Thrones was by far the most pirated TV-show of last year. However, according to the show’s director, David Petrarca, these unauthorized downloads actually do more good than harm. Petrarca explains that the show needs “cultural buzz” to thrive and survive, and this buzz is being generated in part by pirates.