MOST PIRATED TV SHOW: GAME OF THRONES

It may be regarded as a dubious honor, but for the second year in a row HBO’s Game of Thrones was the most-pirated TV show, according to TorrentFreak.com, which tracks BitTorrent usage. The season finale of the series, it said, was downloaded 5.9 million times. In fact, more people watched it illegally than watched it legally via HBO. The pay-TV service may be partially responsible for all those downloads, Torrent Freak observed, inasmuch as it refuses to license the series to online video services like Netflix, Amazon, or Hulu. Earlier this year Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner, which owns HBO, said that piracy, by generating “tremendous word-of-mouth,” actually boosts sales of subscriptions to the pay-TV company. It’s “better than an Emmy,” he said.