Oliver Haslam·

Downloading Game Of Thrones Season 7 Torrents? HBO May Go After You

Well if you are downloading Game of Thrones season 7 episodes illegally via torrents, it’s important to know that HBO might take action against you. Here are the details.

Earlier this week HBO kicked off the highly anticipated seventh season of Game of Thrones, and as soon as the first episode ended it popped up on the internet, with torrentors rushing to get their hands on it.

We told you recently how the episode quickly spread across torrenting and streaming sites breaking previous records, and now it seems that HBO is keen to make sure that everyone knows that if they download its content illegally, then they can expect consequences. Whether those consequences are enough to stop anyone doing it though, remains to be seen.

As soon as the episode was pirated, HBO’s piracy partner Echolon started sending notices to the ISPs of those who were seen to be distributing the content via torrents, requesting that they in turn tell their users to, well, not do it anymore. The notices include the IP address of the user that was found to be in breach of copyright as well as text that even goes the route of suggesting that downloaders of pirated content are at risk of security breaches.

“We have information leading us to believe that the IP address xx.xxx.xxx.xx was used to download or share Game of Thrones without authorization,” the notification begins.

“HBO owns the copyright or exclusive rights to Game of Thrones, and the unauthorized download or distribution constitutes copyright infringement.”

While US ISPs are not required by law to forward the requests on to their users, they can do so as a courtesy to copyright holders. With Game of Thrones officially the most pirated TV series ever, we expect this whole charade to take place each and every week a new episode airs, so sit tight folks.

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