Jeffrey Bleich isn’t your normal Game of Thrones fan. Oh, no. He also happens to be the U.S. Ambassador to Australia. And, in his official capacity as Ambassador, he has a message for you, Aussies: Stop pirating Game of Thrones! Stop it! Bad Aussies!

As far as allowing you freedom to watch, Netflix is pretty good about things. You can register up to six devices to an account at one time, and stream simultaneously to two. It’s also pretty cool about passwords and log ons. No digging into your cable provider’s website to find your registration info, or worse, calling your friend with HBO and instructing them on how to find that info on their cable provider’s website.

And so Netflix knows that somewhere around 10 million of its subscribers are getting the service for free, by logging in under the accounts of friends or family, but rather than cracking down on those folks, they’re offering another option.

Good news, HBO-less Game of Thrones fans. HBO has heard your pleas to make HBO GO, their online streaming service, available to those who don’t have cable. And they have responded with a resounding “Maybe. Eventually.”

Hey, it’s better than “no.”

When Game of Thrones director David Petrarca made a brief statement in support of online piracy at Perth’s Writing Festival over the weekend, he probably wasn’t expecting it to get him in trouble with his bosses. While we’re not sure he did directly, HBO felt the need to issue a statement and after that, Petrarca was quick to retract his own. 

It didn’t really surprise anyone to find out HBO’s Game of Thrones was the most pirated show of 2012. After all, HBO is a paid subscription service and many people don’t like their limited expensive options in a world immediate entertainment. But I suppose it doesn’t help the cause when one of the people working the show, a director to be more specific, publicly says he doesn’t mind when people pirate his show. And it just so happens that The Copyright Alert System is about to start sending us all notices to stop the illegal downloads. Great timing, dude. 

Game of Thrones lost out on the “most pirated television” title last year to Dexter. Could the scrappy younger show pull out the ignominious win this year?

Yes.

Yes it could.

Seriously, Finland? We understand that Internet piracy is a problem, but this is just too much. Police raided the home of a nine-year-old girl and confiscated her laptop — her Winnie the Pooh laptop – because she was accused of downloading one song off The Pirate Bay. That really happened. We all live in this world now.

Back in the spring of this year, the parents of the little girl were told their Internet connection had been used in an act of online piracy. Their daughter had come across a song she was searching for on The Pirate Bay and downloaded it. She later bought the album. The family was told to pay 600 euros for the incident and sign a non-disclosure agreement, but they refused at the time. On Tuesday, things got real when Finnish police showed up at their door with a search warrant, and took their daughter’s Winnie the Pooh laptop.

Read more of this story at Geekosystem.com.

Hugh Laurie, an actor who’s known primarily in the states for playing the misanthropic Dr. House to a tee but who is probably equally as famous in the nerd world for his association with Stephen Fry and Rowan Atkinson’s implausibly historical comedy series Blackadder, is in between projects at the moment, so far as we plebes are aware. House finished up its last season in May, and we we’re looking forward to whatever Laurie did next, comedic or dramatic, although we did hope it was something that would prove to more Americans who’ve only seen him on House that, yes, his natural accent is a British one.

We didn’t dare hope that he’d be a pirate.

At my last address, my at-the-time roommate and I were dismayed when, one morning, we were slapped with a Digital Millennium Copyright Violation warning by our Internet service provider. The charge was televison-show-specific, and while we’d both been guilty of indiscriminate minor acts of piracy in the past (college, we swear), we were damned if we were going to get blamed for our neighbor’s need to find out what happens on Boardwalk Empire. We scrambled to lock down our easily-hackable connection, and that was that.

If it had been a couple years later, it turns out, we need not have worried. And, as with so many Internet breakthroughs, this score-one-for-the-side-of-the-user all starts with porn.

It had the makings of an old comedy routine: “Take my money, please!” In reality, it was a plea by fans of HBO original programming like Game of Thrones and True Blood, to get the paid cable network to offer their HBO GO service without an HBO subscription. Sounds like a simple solution to a problem as big as piracy but like most things in life, it’s not that simple. Hit the jump to read about the informal survey that asked people how much they would pay for such a service as well as what HBO had to say when they heard about it.