THE fourth season of George R.R. Martin’s Game Of Thrones kicked off yesterday in the US, and it didn’t take long for pirated copies to start proliferating at rates never seen before online, according to piracy tracking web site TorrentFreak.

The site reported that there were more than a million downloads of the premiere episode of season four, although no one torrent broke records because it was so widely available.

The episode was pirated worldwide, but Australian IP addresses made up 11.6 per cent of the total of a sample taken during the day — the most of any country.

US sources made up 9.6 per cent of the total at the same time, while UK IP addresses made up 5.8 per cent.

Melbourne can apparently take the crown as the home to the most Game Of Thrones pirates, closely followed by Athens and then Sydney.

Brisbane and Perth also make it into the top ten cities with 1.4 per cent and 1.3 per cent respectively.

HBO’s own US-only streaming service for mobile devices, HBO Go, also suffered a serious period of downtime, which may have contributed to the record-setting pace of illegal downloads from US sources.