AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’ may soon disappear from popular torrent sites; take-down notices very effective

The insanely popular TV show “The Walking Dead” has been dealt the piracy blow with AMC sending take-down notices to popular piracy websites over the weekend, operating under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As popularity and piracy go hand in hand, “The Walking Dead” was no different. In fact, it is the second-most pirated TV show after “Game of Thrones.”

In 2015, “The Walking Dead” was pirated a whopping 6.9 million times whereas “Game of Thrones” was pirated 7.5 million times. “The Walking Dead” copyright holder AMC believes it has had enough and is now taking stern action. After it sent notices, the result was down and fans were in for a surprise when the torrents simply disappeared.

The 10^th episode has just released and AMC will be sending notices again. Pirates have to be quick this time before all their torrents are taken down. The policing of the popular show has been quite effective as an operator of a small torrent site that processes take-down requests automatically said that he was shocked to see the result.

TorrentFreak recently spoke with the operator and he had trouble locating a recent episode of “The Walking Dead.”

“It was quite surprising not to find the episode I was looking for. For the first time in my life I had to actually use a file locker, not by choice but by the effectiveness of DMCA. It literally made my life more annoying for about two minutes,” he said.

However, even though the take-down measures have been highly effective, it’s literally impossible to force all torrent sites into complying. Users can still find a torrent after patient browsing.

According to News.com.au, Steve Pontillo, AMC’s executive vice president, revealed that AMC will be using NexGuard’s watermarking technology soon “to trace the source of potential illegal copies of each video asset.”