The speculation and drive for new material with Game of Thrones has gone to some extraordinary lengths in the past.
The sets have been long-lensed by photographers, fans roamed the streets of Belfast looking for castmembers, even the cast themselves had to lie to one another and use codenames to try and minimise secrets leaving the set. However, there are some leaks that are out of everyone's control.
Earlier this morning, HBO Nordic - the studio's Scandinavian arm - accidentally leaked the fifth episode of Game of Thrones online. It's not known exactly what happened, but it's known that the leak came from HBO Nordic themselves and not from a hacker group or any kind of press-leak.
Interestingly, this year's marked the first year since Game of Thrones' inception that HBO didn't furnish press with the opening five episodes of the series. It's been standard practice for HBO to send members of the press out a screener link, however the process was halted this year. These screeners were, of course, heavily watermarked and were tracked digitally by security measures.
Not only that, Game of Thrones is on target to become the most pirated television series of all time. HBO also reportedly begun tracking pirates and more than a few have received cease-and-desist e-mails from the studio. This isn't the first time an episode has leaked online for Game of Thrones. Season 3's second episode also leaked online back in 2012.
Obviously, we're not going to link to the episode and, from what we understand, it's a pretty bad copy of the episode.
You can wait at least one day, people.
Via TorrentFreak.com
