The European Union aims to crack down on piracy

[Len]

It’s no secret that Game of Thrones has a piracy problem. While season 7 had more legal viewers per episode than ever before, it was also watched illegally just over a billion times; that’s ‘billion’ with a ‘b.’ All in all, more people watched season 7 illegally than legally.

And Game of Thrones is just one show. The market for pirated material is thriving. Obviously, the content creators of the world aren’t thrilled about this, nor are the governments that want to prevent this kind of theft. According to Reuters, the European Union is aiming to crack down on piracy with new draft guidelines on copyright policy to be published at the end of this month. “Online platforms need to significantly step up their actions to address this problem,” the guidelines read in part. “They need to be proactive in weeding out illegal content, put effective notice-and-action procedures in place, and establish well-functioning interfaces with third parties (such as trusted flaggers) and give a particular priority to notifications from national law enforcement authorities.”

At the moment, the onus for finding and calling attention to illegal material posted to the internet is on the content creator. So if HBO comes across, say, a stream of a leaked episode of Game of Thrones, it’s their duty to alert whatever company is hosting the stream. Then the company takes it down. Basically, the EU wants companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) to take more responsibility. The guidelines encourage companies to hone technology that lets them detect infringing content before it’s uploaded, rather than after. It also wants them to give more weight to takedown notices sent by “trusted flaggers” and to publish “transparency reports” on how they respond to the notices they get.

The guidelines are not binding, but could lead to legislation down the line. Notably, Google already does a lot of this stuff on its own, but making it official could put more pressure on the company to protect the interests of places like HBO. It should also be noted that any legislation “would not change the liability exemption for online platforms in EU law,” meaning that there are currently no plans to hold companies legally responsible for the actions of the people who upload infringing material to their sites — this is just meant to give the companies more reason to police themselves.

Will any of this help prevent piracy of Game of Thrones episodes come season 8? It’s hard to say. But when you’re dealing with a billion-with-a-b-sized problem, it’s easy to see why people are looking for solutions.