For a country accustomed to topping the list of illicit downloaders of TV shows, coming fourth sounds like a positively paltry effort for Australia.
And yet there we are: fourth out of 10 countries where episodes of the new series of House of Cards are being shared without authorisation via peer-to-peer networks.
The piracy tracking company Excipio has released a list of countries where the critically-acclaimed series, which was released in the United States via the streaming platform Netflix this week, is doing a booming, albeit unauthorised, trade.
According to Excipio, the three biggest downloaders are China, the US and India, an unsurprising result given the size of the countries.
They were followed by Australia, in fourth place, and then, in order, Poland, the UK, Canada, France, Greece and the Netherlands.
According to Excipio, the volume of illicit downloads for season three is roughly double that of season two.
The data supplied by Excipio does not break down the sharing of episodes individually, but notes that episodes of the series were downloaded 681,889 times in the first 24 hours.
That figure breaks down further to: China (60,538), the United States (50,008), India (47,106), Australia (40,557), Poland (37,552), the United Kingdom (32,703), Canada (27,584), France (27,151), Greece (20,551) and the Netherlands (20,402).
In a twist which casts a revealing complexion on the data, five of the 10 countries – China, India, Australia, Poland and Greece – are territories where Netflix's service is not yet available.
That would seem to validate the theory that piracy of copyrighted content flourishes in environments where local rights holders are slow to bring a product to market.
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In Australia, the third season of Netflix was owned by the cable company Foxtel, which had screened the preceding season day and date in line with the US launch.
However, Netflix negotiated the return of the rights to the series earlier this year so it could be featured as a flagship program when the local Netflix service is switched on this month.
The net effect is that the launch of the third season of House of Cards in Australia is effectively delayed by roughly three to four weeks.
A secondary issue for Netflix is that consumers from territories where is does not yet operate access the US service via software which bypasses the company's "geoblock".
According to media reports as many as 200,000 Australians have accessed the US Netflix service in that manner.
