this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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At first this article reads like your typical anti-piracy screed. It rants about how 10x more people watched GoT illegally (confusing them with lost sales) and ends with how downloading movies can get your credit card stolen.

The middle of the article however, destroys the author's case.

Time Warner (owning company of HBO) CEO Alan Bewkes stated in 2013 how becoming the most illegally streamed show in history was “better than an Emmy” and that torrenting ultimately led to more paid subscriptions.

“We’ve been dealing with this for 20, 30 years—people sharing subs, running wires down the backs of apartment buildings. Our experience is that it leads to more paying subs. I think you’re right that Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world and that’s better than an Emmy.”

The CEO of Time Warner, who knows more about the finances of his own show than ForeverGeek writer Tom Llewellyn, championed piracy and said that it brought them more subscribers rather than nearly destroying the show as the article claims.

Needless to say, Tom forwent a rebuttal in favor of writing how you can get malware from downloading it...

Anti-Piracy Propaganda: 0 Truth: 1

(page 2) 50 comments
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[–] insanecrazy4@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And I’ll fucking do it again

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[–] Koffiato@lemmy.ml 18 points 1 year ago

It's not even available in my own country to begin with lmao.

[–] Lumidaub@feddit.de 16 points 1 year ago

movies can get your credit card stolen

joke's on you i've never had a credit card

[–] mycroft@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If GoT had "ended" over privacy at the end of Season 7 it would still have a following. People would still wear their hair like the characters in the show... It would have created a pop culture sensation that lasted at least a generation. Now we have a funny reminder occasionally since so and so named their daughter Khaleesi in the middle of the "Breaker of Chains" season...

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It's actually interesting, I've never seen something so popular ruined so quickly. For a while you heard about GoT everywhere and then those two fucks destroyed it so much that no one even wants to rewatch it.

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[–] Adori@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

The correct way to put the title is "HBO's Game of thrones was nearly destroyed by limiting access to it through high subscription costs for their platform."

[–] Mrkawfee@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

They did a good job destroying GoT by themselves tbh.

[–] ANIMATEK@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Honest question.. how do you even know how many times a show was pirates? I mean the whole concept is to be de-centralized and anonymous.

[–] Kushan@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

The same way you know how many times a show was watched legitimately, you take a sample of known data and extrapolate it from there. It's basically guesswork but it's educated guesswork.

BitTorrent, even though it's decentralised, is still operating on the public internet using public, known protocols. You can join a swarm and get an idea of how big that swarm is with a small amount of data inspection. I mean, your torrent client knows how many seeders and leechers there are, right? Just watch the swarms and extrapolate from there.

Any time you read these articles, they're always caveated with something similar to "The number could be much higher than that" too because it's not just torrents, you've got newsgroups, file shares, streaming sites, even old school IRC, people putting titles on a USB stick and so on. Hence there's a lot of guessing, but it's not entirely plucked from thin air.

Where it does get more bullshitty is when they try to translate those numbers into lost sales. That is just made up numbers as far as I'm concerned.

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[–] Flolishous@lib.lgbt 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Man it would be their own fault when it came to Australia, trying to watch it legally had to pay for pay TV and if you only payed for the service for the express purpose of watching GOT it worked out at $70 per episode. Fuck that.

[–] Hobo@lzrprt.sbs 9 points 1 year ago

And that's why we were the number 1 pirates of GoT by a mile!

[–] tram1@programming.dev 11 points 1 year ago

hot take: maybe Game of Thrones should have been destroyed

[–] Gabtraf@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago

I became so eager to consume the show, that I paid for NowTV so I could legally stream it much sooner than pirates ha fit available, and I'd get up an hour earlier than I needed to for work just to watch it so I didn't have it spoiled.

[–] foggy@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

Damn, pirates almost saved the show??

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