The latest episode of Game of Thrones leaked, script outlines have been published and reporters have been contacted. All mere days before the episode was supposed to have been released. If you need to be caught up on all of this, click here or google it. Up to you.
But this happened ages ago, didn’t it? Well, yes and no. Having episodes being leaked isn’t exactly a new thing for the crew over at HBO – season five was notable for the amount of leaks that it struggled with, but season seven (the current one) is a BIG one. Worlds are colliding and it has more hype than ever. There are bound to be consequences from this, here are just a few:
An Abundance of Spoilers
Ah yes, spoilers. The bane of many tv and movie watchers alike. Sure, perhaps it might feel empowering to know things that others don’t. Tempting to spill everything that you know out into the open. This much is evident from the way people revel over their surprise spoiler attacks on twitter and from the glee that is riddled into revealing text messages. It’s almost the complete reverse for those who aren’t aware of these scandalous little details.
People are having their Sunday evenings, Monday mornings or work breaks ruined by people who feel it’s their right to share everything that went down. I mean, they’re not wrong; freedom of speech and everything but, come on. It’s a little bit of an a-hole move to pull. Yet people still do it. Those who were looking forward to a little bit of a sit-down will instead be staring dully at the screen and be all the more gloomy for it.
An Online Streaming Crackdown
STOP! If you’re streaming the tv online, it’s quite likely that it’s illegal. You personally might not have gone through any nefarious loopholes to watch it; for you, it might just be a click of a button. Nothing illegal there. Oh hey, have you ever heard of guilty by association?
Oh, don’t worry. I’m not the internet police coming to take all of your wifi away. There will, however, be an increasing urgency in the halting of piracy. One thing that the leak has likely managed to do, aside from increasing the amount of people who have been spoiled for the next episode, is make the big shots at HBO both embarrassed and quite angry. Someone needs to feel their wrath. Someone needs to pay. After all, a singular episode can cost around $10 million to make and you better believe that it’s not coming out of their pockets.
