Here's a multiple-choice question for you.
On Monday, Game of Thrones smashed audience records in Australia for both "legitimate" (paid subscription) and "illegitimate" (unpaid, torrented) viewing. Does this mean that (a) Australians are among the world's worst pirates; (b) Australians are turning their back on piracy; (c) both; or (d) that's too tricky, can I please pass?
There's no easy answer – which probably makes (d) the right one – but there's a growing sense that the ground may be shifting in the seemingly endless debate over content piracy in this country.
Then again, it's a confusing picture.
Let's start with the numbers: Foxtel claims the season 6 premiere of Game of Thrones was watched by 727,000 people in Australia on Monday, making it the country's most-watched subscription television program ever. (The previous record was 719,000 for the 2011 Rugby World Cup semi-final between Australia and New Zealand. On any normal day, the top program on pay TV is typically watched by between 100,000 and 200,000 people, about one-tenth the audience of that day's top program on free-to-air television.) Encore screenings and catch-up have since pushed that figure north of 900,000.
But at the same time as all those paying customers were watching, so were the pirates: within 12 hours of its debut on US cable network HBO, the show had been downloaded more than a million times – one in eight of those in Australia. Some of that was down to the favourable time-zone difference (updated figures are not available), but it fits with a well-established pattern: in 2015, Australia accounted for 11.6 per cent of the world's illegal downloads.
Australians are such inveterate pirates of content, the argument goes, because it takes so long for content to reach us, and when it gets here it is priced too high.
Whatever the merits of those arguments, in the case of GoT (and much else besides) they no longer hold much water. Monday's episode was fast-tracked, screening in Australia just half an hour after it began screening in the US.
Foxtel had an introductory price offer too – available only to new customers – making all five past seasons of GoT plus the new episodes available for $30 a month for the first three months on its streaming service, Foxtel Play (a repeat of a strategy it also used last year). If you watched every episode and then cancelled your trial subscription at the end of that three months you'd be paying just $1.50 an episode (albeit in standard definition quality only). Hard to gripe about that being too expensive.
Foxtel won't reveal if the offer produced a spike in subscriber numbers, but a spokesman did say that "Game of Thrones is definitely a major drawcard, and we expect it to continue its popularity with new customers this season".
He added that any bump in subscribers might be due to other factors as the launch offer "coincides with the kick-off of some great sport coverage and other popular shows, which creates a perfect storm this time of year".
You can read that as "please don't think we only have one show worth subscribing for".
Foxtel is keen to point to the fact that the gap between legal and illegal consumption of Game of Thrones is widening. In 2015, one-third of the show's viewers in Australia were not paying for it. If the current ratio holds, that will have dropped to about one-sixth.
But that victory will have come at significant cost: Foxtel claims it increased subscriptions last financial year by 9 per cent – it says it has 2.8 million "subscribing homes" in Australia – but it did so by cutting the cost of those subscriptions substantially. Even so, Australia remains the highest-revenue per customer market in the world.
When it comes to piracy v pay, it seems the world is split into three camps: those who believe the rights holders should be able to charge what they like for content; those who believe consumers should have to pay, but not through the nose; and those who believe all content is there for the taking.
To get a sense of the scale of the problem for rights holders, consider this: a recent report on torrenting estimated that "the largest global piracy websites ... were visited a dazzling 141 billion times over a 12-month period".
Here's the good news for those rights holders: that number was on a downwards trajectory. Here's the bad news: the pirates aren't giving up on piracy, they're just moving from torrent sites to downloading and streaming services in search of their content.
Separate research presented last October by Creative Content Australia (formerly the IP Awareness Foundation, a body that lobbies on behalf of copyright holders) found that Australians had become significantly less likely to pirate in the past 12 months.
"We did flag, however, that that may have had something to do with the free trial subscriptions on offer from the streaming services such as Stan, Netflix and Presto," a spokeswoman said.
Anecdotally, the suggestion is that the figures may be heading north again, though how far or fast is not yet clear.
There's little doubt that a combination of education (piracy is theft, and it costs jobs), intimidation (the high-profile, if largely unsuccessful, legal campaigns against torrenters), and innovation (the entry of low-cost, high-definition streaming services) has begun to make its mark on the minds of many Australians.
But to say the tide has turned on piracy? Well, that might be to invite a torrent of scorn.
