Because it was great and it wasn't available legally in so many countries, or it was with forced reader and no native-English language versions in TV or 480p streaming online.

It's most pirated because it was great quality product with low quality service and delivery.

There's was also providers in the UK who's bad video compression made the picture so dark it was unwatchable.

Are you sure you weren't just tuning in to season 8, episode 3

That's probably the episode they're talking about but it doesn't render their complaint less valid. It just shows the limits of streaming technology in its current form.

Also in some markets the official local release was a year behind. Given that it's not possible to get an HBO subscription outside of the US, for many people pirating was the only way to watch it.

Or in the Netherlands, where is was exclusive to 1 ISP

An ISP that provided cable internet exclusively; so if you had fibre at home it wouldn't even make sense to use them.

But it was a devil's bargain: you would then have to wait multiple weeks for the 5th episode.

I have an HBO premium subscription (along with access to HBO Go), but I have downloaded a few of the episodes over torrent to ensure I can watch it where there was no internet or where it was unstable.

While I have technically participated in copyright infringement (I haven't raided any ships, I promise, arrgh), I do not feel I have done anything morally wrong.

If you're in USA or somewhere else with liberal Fair Use then you might not have infringed?

I'm not sure there's any caselaw on downloading content you've paid for? Seems very close to format/time shifting to me.

Possibly depends if you leeched or not.

I don't think that this argument would hold up in court as you're not just downloading for yourself (which you could argue you have a license to the content), but you're also providing (at least parts) of the content to others. I think this is where you'd definitely get into trouble.

Yup, at least in Germany that's the legal situation: They send out cease&desist letters because torrent upload counts as "sharing the copyrighted work without a license", and because of bit-torrent high connectivity they just assume by default that you are doing it on the "scale of a business", stipulating absurd damage sums.

I once torrented an episode of the show The Americans, my last option as my usual sources were weirdly all offline and it was the middle of a season, the show wasn't even legally distributed in Germany at the time.

Turned out some German publisher picked up the distribution rights to the show and their first action wasn't to make it legally available in Germany, but trying to profit from Germans who followed the show trough piracy by sending out serial c&d letters demanding 800€ payments and stipulating damages in the range of 10k€

It's a pretty wide-spread and annoying situation to such a degree that using public torrent is a very quick way to get expensive mail as there's a whole lot of anti-piracy outfits in Germany that monitor public torrent trackers for German IPs downloading files named after copyrighted works to send out those c&d letters.

I'm not living in Germany, but am downloading torrents (to watch stuff unavailable via HBO/Netflix) via VPN which terminates in Germany. I wonder if the VPN company is getting shitloads of those C&D letters and if they can ever blow back on me.

That would depend on the specific VPN ToS.

Afaik the worst they could do is cancel your service/subscription because the c&d letter is addressed to the owner of the connection, which in your case would be the VPN company.

Yeah, good point: I do not usually seed stuff that I believe is highly likely to result in C&D letters from my ISP. So yeah, fair use might apply.

Yup. Entirely HBO's fault too. I don't know why they didn't offer HBO GO with a paid subscription. Missed out on so many sales.

It was on HBO Now, which you could get with a paid subscription. It's how I watched it in Japan.