The thing is HBO doesn't fool around with semantics. They will come after anything and everything hard. They basically ruined Denny's business.
I tried to sell a Nucky Thompson head on ebay. One of the Inigo sculpts. Ebay canceled the listing and the note was that it was in violation of copyright infringement. I resisted it as Steve Buschemi and I still got the same note.
They completely shut down the torrenting systems. Which is not a bad thing, I don't advocate for that but I remember back in the day one of the most disturbing things to ever happen to me was when I was trying to watch boardwalk empire. This was pre iTunes being what it is now, pre-HBO Go, Pre On demand. The first season had ended about a year prior ago and I was a subscriber to HBO through time Warner. Still I could not watch this damn thing no matter how hard I tried.
They took their sweet *** time releasing DVDs, like I said no on demand or iTunes. I had no choice but to torrent it. Anyways one day I came home and my MAC was completely overtaken with this blue screen with a warning from HBO legal saying they have flagged my computer for illegally downloading HBO content and would have 24 hours to completely remove it from my machine before legal action would be taken. It freaked me out. I've never had anything happen like that since and still don't know how that happened.