Game of Thrones is known in equal measure for its densely interwoven plot and its many, many, many nude scenes. But recently, lusty clips and compilations from HBO’s biggest cash cow have slowly started disappearing from Pornhub, one of the internet’s biggest porn sites. Suffice to say this will be an exercise in futility.
The Sun first reported the copyright claims, quoting an HBO spokesperson who said that the network is “in the process of getting material taken down from Pornhub”. And it does seem some videos have been taken down. TorrentFreak reports that uploaders are getting warning letters by the thousands, which demand that the pirates remove full episodes, clips and compilations.
Compilations like these have existed since the early days of the internet and can be found for just about every popular piece of media in which even the faintest hint of nudity appears. It’s the business model that sites like Mr Skin rely on. “[Movie title] nude clips” will almost always yield something, even if it’s just the dressed-down moments of one particular actor, and porny compilations for GoT started cropping up right after the show’s debut. So even if Pornhub is willing to comply with HBO’s demands, users are capable of uploading GoT‘s copyrighted genitalia faster than it can be taken down. Cursory Pornhub searches — for the show’s actors, or even “Game of Thrones” — reveal many pages of results. Results from other porn sites, which HBO is seemingly not focused on curtailing, are even more extensive.
Porn sites are far from the only place Game of Thrones’ nude scenes proliferate past their air date. On communities like Reddit’s r/watchitfortheplot — which features Emilia Clarke among the women in its header image — users happily post lascivious scenes to neutral platforms like Streamable, or cut them into gifs and distribute them on Gfycat or Imgur. Nude scenes have also been compiled by torrenters so they can be downloaded en masse. Just as you can download all of season one from a single torrent, so can you download all of that season’s breasts and butts. What a time we live in. Even legitimate websites, like the Huffington Post, have been compiling the show’s prominent nudity into season-based supercuts for years.
HBO has had a long history of issuing takedowns, and averages around 120,000 URLs requested to be stricken from Google each week. The network recently went to war with Game of Thrones prediction YouTuber Frikidoctor — issuing takedowns on his spoiler-filled vlogs. The network even tried to get VLC Media Player taken down back in 2013… for some reason. Those both went about as well as their slow quest to take Westeros out of Pornhub.
In the end, HBO has pitched a battle on pirate boobs it probably can’t win — but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to try. We reached out to HBO for details on these takedowns but had not heard back at time of writing.
[The Sun via TorrentFreak]