While many fans fawn over exclusive photos of HBO’s Game of Thrones series each week in preparation for Sundays’ new episodes, some people also flock to sites like Pornhub to get a free fix of thousands of pirated sex scenes from the series, to HBO’s great disdain, TorrentFreak reports.
Apparently Pornhub’s users have been uploading a slew of pirated scenes—the ones you’d specifically want to avoid watching with your parents—putting the site at risk of copyright infringement. HBO caught on quick and has reportedly issued takedown requests to the porn site.
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Pornhub’s vice president Corey Price told Broadly that it employs the use of a third-party protection service that helps the site weed out any copyrighted material, which it subsequently removes. “We respect all copyright requests and, once received, immediately remove any infringing content,” he said.
The sex, nude, and parody scenes are some of PornHub’s top demands. According to a PornHub Insights report, after 2.5 million people tuned in to watch the show’s return in May, a whopping 6 million people searched for Westeros-related content on the porn site. In those searches, they used phrases like “Daenerys” and “Walk of Shame.” On the day of the release, PornHub saw a 370 percent surge in searches for Game of Thrones scenes.
HBO has also assertively attacked big-name torrent sites like KickassTorrents and Torrentz with takedown requests, and episodes have been removed en masse. Along with the run-of-the-mill “we’re aware someone with your IP address illegally downloaded our show” schtick, the threatening email adds you can easily—and for pretty low cost—watch Game of Thrones legally online, complete with all the butts, boobs, blood, and dragons your heart desires.
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Photo courtesy of HBO