Police cracking down on illegal streaming as Game of Thrones piracy grows

The "borderless nature of the internet" causes difficulties for law enforcement, but is now driving innovative forms of policing.

Police are developing new techniques to disrupt piracy online as illegal streams and legitimate viewership figures for Game of Thrones both break record levels.

Last week's episode of Games of Thrones was viewed by even more people globally than the season's opening episode - a record at the time, with 4.7 million viewers watching on Sky.

That record viewership came despite the season opener being pirated by more than 90 million people around the world, making it one of the most pirated materials in history, according to analysis firm Muso.

More than six million of those pirate viewers were in the UK, second only to the US in terms of piracy rates, where there is now a maximum sentence of 10 years imprisonment for people found guilty of copyright infringement.

Despite these sanctions, piracy levels are continuing to grow.

Online piracy in the UK is policed by the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), a specialist team in the City of London force, sponsored by the Intellectual Property Office.

Officers, who have been finding traditional enforcement increasingly difficult in the face of this widespread criminality, are now developing innovative methods in their attempts to combat piracy.

PIPCU's Paul Hogarth, who has 20 years of policing experience, told Sky News the force is embracing the modern move of disrupting illegal streaming where classical enforcement action does not work.

"The big thing about the internet is that it's borderless and the big thing about law enforcement is that it's rife with borders," PC Hogarth said.

He said the borderless nature of the internet poses difficulties for law enforcement because "the gaps in jurisdiction are where the criminals sit, it's what they use".

Pirates can mask their activities by using a number of jurisdictions; living in one country while operating computer servers in another, and routing the traffic for that server somewhere else as well.

To deal with this, PIPCU engages in a "number of disruption exercises" which are "a lot more cost effective and can be done remotely", said PC Hogarth.

PIPCU has disrupted piracy by "following the money" through its Operation Creative, which encourages advertisers to stop working with copyright infringing websites, taking away criminals' revenue.

However, those running the pirate sites may not always be making a lot of money from them, while they could be causing millions in losses for the production companies.

PIPCU actively works with those hosting pirate sites to get them taken down.

"The downside with this is it's a lot less permanent," said PC Hogarth. "You can take a site down one day and it can pop up the next day.

"In fact a lot of criminals who are ahead of the game will have a dozen sites ready to pop straight back up once you take one down."