Game of Thrones Season 8: Battling the pirates

You can close the betting now. Outlasting every pretender for the right to rule, the winner from Emmys to BAFTA in 2020 will be a Westeros lock-out.

Already the most Emmy garlanded drama show in history, the insanely popular TV franchise is valued by some analysts at north of $1 billion. Naturally, the season’s end game has been closely guarded but even the most ironclad measures are unlikely to prevent it from being the most pirated series ever.

Four episodes of season five popped up on pirate sites before official transmission and another set were hijacked in 2017.

IP Echelon (now owned by Vobile), the Australian anti-piracy company used by HBO for season seven, monitored torrents and issued thousands of warning letters to ISPs but that didn’t prevent over a billion illegal streams, according to monitoring firm Muso.

Even the cast during filming of season eight had to learn their lines from firewall protected iPads, not printed scripts.

According to Joe Dempsie (who plays Gendry) the security extended to any information about shooting. “During the whole course of season seven and season eight I have never…