Last year, Tor Books UK went completely DRM free. At the time, the publisher said that it was removing DRM from its e-books because it was a “constant annoyance” to its customers. It also said that DRM prevented customers “from using legitimately purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving the from one kind of e-reader to another.”

It’s been a year since Tor Books removed DRM from its products. Did the publisher suddenly see a sharp increase in piracy? Is the company finding that its business is failing because of its move? Will publishers that still insist on DRM look at them and say “Told you so” while sporting a malicious grin?

In all actuality, none of the above occurred as removing DRM has had no discernable effect on the publisher. Tor UK’s Editorial Director Julie Crisp said just as much in a blog post this week:

As it is, we’ve seen no discernible increase in piracy on any of our titles, despite them being DRM-free for nearly a year.

Crisp never outright says that sales increased when Tor UK removed DRM, but she does say that it has endeared readers and authors to the publisher:

The move has been a hugely positive one for us, it’s helped establish Tor and Tor UK as an imprint that listens to its readers and authors when they approach us with a mutual concern—and for that we’ve gained an amazing amount of support and loyalty from the community.

Of course, some publishers will argue that Tor’s experience with ditching DRM is the exception. They’ll argue that DRM is necessary to stop piracy, but we already know that DRM does nothing to stop piracy. Instead, in the words of Charles Stross, DRM is a “monopoly” that reduces readers’ freedom while hampering competition.

Even with Tor’s evidence, DRM will still be used for many years to come. Legacy industries refuse to even entertain the idea that DRM may be negatively affecting legitimate customers opting instead to continue beating the anti-piracy war drums.

[h/t: TechDirt]

Ars Technica reports that Sabam, the Belgian equivalent of the RIAA, have taken Belgium’s ISPs to court demanding they pay 3.4 percent of what they get from customers to content owners. In other words, Sabam is suggesting that ISPs pay an Internet tax to make up for what it perceives as lost revenue due to piracy.

Apparently, Sabam has been trying to get reach an agreement with ISPs over such a “tax” since 2011. It only brought the matter to the courts when the deal fell through. ISPs are saying an Internet tax to be paid to content owners “lacks any legal basis,” but content owners obviously don’t think that way.

Now, this situation brings up a really intriguing concept. Would you be willing to pay a few extra dollars per month on your Internet bill to continue pirating content? Even if you didn’t pirate content yourself, you would still be paying for those who did. Would that be fair to all the people who buy their content from legitimate sources? Such a tax would remove the need for efforts like the Copyright Alert System and other three/six strikes systems that punish Internet users for downloading pirated content.

Of course, the flip side to such a “tax” is that it would embolden content owners and other industries to demand similar fees from ISPs. ISPs would then pass off the extra cost to the consumer resulting in even more expensive monthly subscription fees.

Still, it’s an interesting proposal – is there a way to only charge those who pirate to satisfy content owners without threatening the sanctity of the Internet? Some have suggested that torrent trackers go private, start charging a monthly fee to downloaders, and pay those fees directly to content owners. It sounds good on paper, but content owners probably wouldn’t go for it. They’re already neurotic about people promoting content on BitTorrent so I highly doubt they would be fine with supporting “paid piracy.”

“I think people do want a great experience and they want access – people are mostly honest. The best way to combat piracy isn’t legislatively or criminally but by giving good options,” he said in a recent interview with Stuff.

Why does he think this? Well, he has some stats to back it up. Apparently, access to Netflix in any particular region is kind of a torrent killer.

“One of the things is we get ISPs to publicise their connection speeds – and when we launch in a territory the Bittorrent traffic drops as the Netflix traffic grows,” said Sarandos.

So, going by that and that alone, it would seem that at least a good proportion of people who illegally download TV shows and movies simply do so because they lack an alternative. Maybe, if they had an alternative, they would take it.

Of course, BitTorrent activity is not limited to piracy, so a decline in BitTorrent traffic doesn’t automatically equate to a decline in the downloading of TVs and movies. I spoke to BitTorrent Director of Communications Christian Averill, who clarifies that BitTorrent sees much of its traffic for actions not related to internet piracy.

“The key thing is that BitTorrent is a Internet protocol, like HTTP. It moves data better than any other protocol. It’s an award winning technology used by Facebook, twitter, Wikipedia, Blizzard, genetic researchers and the scientists that are working on the Large Haldron Collider. Any company moving large data sets uses BitTorrent,” he says.

But the fact remains, although it’s out of their control, people use BitTorrent to download content. And a decline in its activity when Netflix becomes available certainly suggests that people are turning to a “legitimate” source of content like a paid streaming service, at least when it’s available.

We can turn to HBO for more proof of this concept. Remember that “Please Take My Money, HBO” campaign that spread on Twitter last year? Sure you do. Thousands upon thousands of people took to Twitter to beg HBO to simply offer an HBO GO-style streaming service free of the ties of a cable subscription. They said that they would gladly pay for it – an average of $12+ a month if I recall.

After dismissing it originally, it appears that the company has softened to the idea – if just a bit.

Remember, HBO’s Game of Thrones was the most pirated show of 2012 and its season 3 premiere episode broke torrent records a few weeks ago.

Would all of these pirates stop pirating if they simply had more legitimate streaming options?

“One of the side effects of growth of content is an expectation to have access to it. You can’t use the internet as a marketing vehicle and then not as a delivery vehicle,” Sarandos added.

You listening, content providers?

TorrentFreak reports that The Pirate Bay has moved yet again. Those looking for the site will now be directed to a .sx domain. The .sx TLD belongs to the small island nation of Sint Maarten, a constituent country owned by both The Netherlands and France.

So, what prompted the move to a new domain? It seems that the Swedish authorities have finally moved to take the .se domain that The Pirate Bay operated under for over a year. While they were at it, the authorities also filed a motion to seize the .is domain that The Pirate Bay recently moved to last week.

The folks behind The Pirate Bay saw this coming earlier this year, and have long since vacated the .se domain. Those visiting the site’s .se domain will be redirected to the new .sx domain though. If the authorities are successful in seizing the domain, those visiting the .se or .is domains will no longer be automatically redirected to whichever home The Pirate Bay decides to move to.

Of course, this latest development might bring a novel legal fight to the forefront as Sweden argues it has jurisdiction over the .is domain because it’s owned by a Swedish national. The company that operates the .is domain – INSIC – told TorrentFreak that Sweden’s argument may not hold much weight in court because the domain is still owned by INSIC, an Icelandic company subject only to Icelandic laws.

In short, The Pirate Bay might get to keep the its .is domain if Sweden’s jurisdiction argument doesn’t hold up in court. Even if it does, The Pirate Bay can fall back on its new .sx domain. If that fails, The Pirate Bay still has hundreds of TLDs in which it can fall back on. Like I said last year, The Pirate Bay is in a war of attrition and it’s winning.

After being tossed out of every port it came across, TorrentFreak reports that The Pirate Bay has finally found a home in Iceland. Its new .is domain reflects the move, and any attempt to visit old domains will redirect you to the new one.

So, why Iceland? It seems that the company that operates the .is domain – ISNIC – won’t take any action against The Pirate Bay, or at least not yet. The company told TorrentFreak that it’s not responsible for what Web sites do on its domain. The only possible way for The Pirate Bay to be booted from its new .is domain is if the Icelandic courts issued a court order.

For now, it looks like The Pirate Bay is safe in its new home. ISNIC has a good track record of hosting controversial sites without any issues. The country’s anti-piracy group will also probably stay away for a while as it’s still reeling from a piracy-related PR disaster from earlier this year.

TorrentFreak reports that The Pirate Bay has now moved from its old .se domain to a new .gl domain. Those attempting to visit the old .se domain will be automatically redirected to the new domain.

So, why the sudden move? The Pirate Bay thinks that Sweden will seize its .se domain in the coming days. The move was made to make sure that users experience no downtime even if a seizure were to take place.

As TorrentFreak points out, the move to a new domain may also bypass the current IP blocks in place in the UK and other countries, if only for a short while. Even if these countries were to block the new IP address, The Pirate Bay has claimed that it has hundreds more in backup to counter any blocking attempts.

It will be interesting to see what happens from here. The Pirate Bay has already moved its servers out of Sweden to make sure physical raids can’t target it, and now its moving around the digital seas to avoid domain seizures. The Pirate Bay has been playing this cat-and-mouse game for years, and it doesn’t look like it’s gonna end any time soon.

“#GameofThrones is renewed for a fourth season. RT & share this update with your friends across the realm,” tweeted HBO’s official Game of Thrones Twitter account this afternoon.

Before today, there was technically a doubt as to whether or not HBO would pick up the show for another season. Technically. The show has been a huge success for HBO, and is one of the network’s most-watched shows (along with True Blood).

#GameofThrones is renewed for a fourth season. RT & share this update with your friends across the realm. twitpic.com/cgh7ze

— Game Of Thrones(@GameOfThrones) April 2, 2013

4.4 million viewers tuned in for Sunday night’s season 3 opener, which is a couple hundred thousand more than tuned in for the season 2 finale – and even more than watched the season 2 opener.

But that 4.4 million number isn’t really representative of everyone who has watched the Game of Thrones premiere in the past few days.

Today we learned that the season 3 premiere broke BitTorrent records. In just a few hours after the first torrent of the show was uploaded, 163,088 people were sharing the single torrent – 110,303 actively sharing and 52,786 still downloading. That broke the previous record of 144,663 peers on a single torrent set after a Heroes season premiere. TorrentFreak estimated that over 1 million people had already downloaded the season 3 premiere. So your 4.4 million is looking more like 5.5 million and maybe even more who have actually watched the show since Sunday.

With numbers like this, Game of Thrones is well on its way to reclaiming the distinction of the most pirated show around – an honor the show took in 2012.

And some at HBO couldn’t really care less. HBO programming head Michael Lombardo recently said that Game of Thrones piracy is really more a compliment than a threat, and that it surely didn’t hurt DVD sales. He made a point to say that HBO still doesn’t support piracy of its content (obviously), but that they “haven’t sent out the Game of Thrones police.”

But the sheer volume it pretty staggering – in fact, it broke records.

TorrentFreak has the numbers: In just a few hours after the first torrent of the show was uploaded, 163,088 people were sharing the single torrent. That broke down to 110,303 actively sharing and 52,786 still downloading.

That’s a record in the world of BitTorrent tracking – the largest previous swarm belonging to a season premiere of Heroes with 144,663 peers.

If you take into account all of the torrents, TorrentFreak reports that estimates put the total number of Game of Thrones season 3 premiere downloads at over a million. That’s a performance that even a hard-to-satisfy Lannister patriarch can be proud of.

If you break down the numbers, the majority of sharers came from the United States (12.9%), barely topping the U.K., who took 11.5% of the pie. Australia came in third with 9,9% of the total downloaders.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons that so many people decided to torrent the show. It has a huge following, first and foremost. HBO’s international release delays don’t help either. Plus, there’s a large contingent in the U.S. (and elsewhere) that simply don’t subscribe to HBO and can’t get HBO GO because they don’t have cable. Many of these people would pay for a standalone HBO streaming service, but HBO is yet to offer that outside a few Scandinavian countries (although the prospects have gotten a bit better as of late).

But according to one HBO exec, this piracy is more of a compliment and less of a problem.

“I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it is a compliment of sorts,” HBO programming head Michael Lombardo recently told EW. “The demand is there. And it certainly didn’t negatively impact the DVD sales. [Piracy is] something that comes along with having a wildly successful show on a subscription network.”

And apparently, not everyone at HBO thinks that this is completely terrible.

HBO programming head Michael Lombardo recently spoke with Entertainment Weekly, and referred to the rampant Game of Thrones piracy as a “compliment of sorts.” Also, it’s not really hurting DVD sales.

“I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it is a compliment of sorts,” Lombardo told EW. “The demand is there. And it certainly didn’t negatively impact the DVD sales. [Piracy is] something that comes along with having a wildly successful show on a subscription network.”

Lombardo also confirmed that per season, Game of Thrones is HBO’s #1 money machine.

Delving deeper in to the issue of piracy, Lombardo cited a concern that doesn’t have anything to do with HBO’s bottom line. He worried that viewers who download the show may be seeing an inferior product.

“One of my worries is about the copies [downloaders are] seeing. The production values of this show are so incredible. So I’m hoping that in the purloined different generation of cuts that the show is holding up.”

This isn’t HBO condoning the piracy of one of its most-popular shows. He make a point to remind us that HBO still attempts to stop piracy when it can. But, they “haven’t sent out the Game of Thrones police.”

Lombardo isn’t the first person associated with HBO to talk about piracy in this manner. Last month, frequent HBO director David Petrarca (GoT, Big Love, True Blood) hinted that shows like Game of Thrones rely on “cultural buzz,” and that downloading is part of that.

He quickly backtracked those comments, saying that Game of Thrones piracy was only a signifier of its popularity, not a cause of it.

HBO had this to say in the wake of that:

“Game of Thrones is sold worldwide, available legally on a large variety of viewing platforms and is one of HBO’s most popular series. With that kind of success comes a great amount of social media chatter, so can’t say we see an upside to illegal downloads.”

While we’re not seeing any monumental shift in the way one of the top cable content providers around views piracy, we are seeing a shift in how some people associated with that content think about it. Of course, if you’re serious about combatting piracy, ease of access to content usually helps – and this is something that HBO has been accused of failing on recently. Last month, HBO CEO Richard Plepler hinted that just maybe, HBO may offer HBO GO apart from cable subscriptions – possibly as a bundle with an ISP.

Because the content is so good, people are willing to do just about anything to get to it. For some, that means paying over $100 a month for a cable subscription + HBO. For others who have cut the cord on cable, that usually means pirating it.

But that’s not because they’re cheap, or because they think that the content isn’t worth paying for. Quite the contrary, actually. At least one online campaign showed that people are more than willing to pay HBO, directly, for their content.

And until now, HBO has shut down any and all hopes of their content moving out from under the cable subscription umbrella. Until now.

HBO CEO Richard Plepler gave cordcutters a glimmer of hope this week. Speaking at the Game of Thrones season 3 premiere, Plepler said that offering HBO content (via HBO GO, the company’s on demand content hub) without requiring a cable subscription could maybe possibly might just may be an option, down the line, maybe.

“Right now we have the right model,” Plepler told Reuters. “Maybe HBO GO, with our broadband partners, could evolve.”

He went on to say that they would “have to make the math work.”

Not exactly a signal that HBO is planning to give up on the lucrative cable subscription-based model that has served them so well for so many years, but it sounds like Plepler is aware that the times may be a’ changing. Although abandoning the traditional distirubtion system system may be a shaky business call, Plepler seems to understand that there is an availability issue with HBO content:

“Doesn’t mean we are not mindful that the problem exists,” he said.

If HBO decided to go this route with an internet-packaged HBO deal, they know that they would have plenty of support for the venture. Last summer, a viral campaign saw hundreds of thousands of people take to Twitter and shout, “Take my money, HBO!”

The campaign was simple. Give us a standalone HBO GO service, free of cable requirements, and take our money. As in we’re ready to pay you for your content if you will just let us. People tweeted the price that they might pay for such a service, and the average was an impressive $12+ per month – a couple bucks more than Netflix. Some people even said that they would pay well over $20 per month for a cordless HBO GO service.

The effort received over 163,000 supporters in just two days.

Shortly after, HBO dismissed the whole thing with a single tweet, basically saying that their model was the right model for now. Thanks, but no thanks.

But these few words from HBO’s CEO gives cordcutters a little bit of hope that HBO could break at least a few of their ties with cable. It’s not like it would be a first for the company. Last year they launched HBO Nordic, a standalone streaming service like HBO GO, in Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark. It’s available for under 10 euros per month.

Hope. Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.