Entertainment

'Rick and Morty' Season 4 on Pornhub says a lot about the future of piracy

Why the most perverted way to watch 'Rick and Morty' for free represents the past and future of online media.

Adult Swim

Many Rick and Morty fans around the world found out the hard way that watching Season 4 is no simple task, especially if you don’t have a cable subscription or happen to live in the UK. But a certain portion of the show’s massive fan base is finding tender comfort in the most unlikely of places: Pornhub.

Snuck in between X-rated videos like the “Pickle Dick” Rick and Morty parody, “Dick and Morty,” and other cosplay or hentai clips too terrifying to describe, are entire pirated versions of new Rick and Morty Season 4.

Fans upload the episodes shortly after they’re made available for digital download, where you can watch them at high quality with nary a buffering icon in sight — it’s no secret that the pornography industry often leads the way in adapting and perfecting new technology, and streaming is no exception.

If you’re shocked to learn that the most efficient (illegal) place to watch Rick and Morty then you probably haven’t been paying attention. After all, this is just the latest in a long, graphic legacy of Pornhub being the raunchiest place to pirate TV shows and movies.

There’s a Reddit community called “r/fullmoviesonpornhub” where users swap Pornhub links for anything from Steven Universe: The Movie to the 1986 Kurt Russell classic Big Trouble in Little China. HBO even tried to sue Pornhub for posting sex scenes from Game of Thrones — but this was only after somebody used the site to leak the fifth episode of GoT’ Season 6 a day before it was supposed to air. It was reportedly that one could watch the entire first half of the Hamilton musical on Broadway starring Lin-Manuel Miranda alongside X-rated display ads.

Truly, look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now.

For anyone not interested in doing the honorable thing — like purchasing Rick and Morty Season 4 on Amazon — the most straightforward but sorta perverted way to watch new Rick and Morty episodes is to do a quick, straightforward Pornhub search akin to “rick and morty season 4 episode 2” and to see what comes up. (Spoiler: Most of what comes up will be totally NSFW.)

According to a statement provided to Gizmodo in 2017, Pornhub officially condemns “uploading non-authorized content” and complies with all DMCA takedowns. That seems to be the case with these new Rick and Morty episodes as well.

The "Pickle Dick" porn parody is about as terrifying as you can possibly imagine.

Pornhub

Pornhub user petruflix had uploaded the first two episodes, but where the videos for Episode 1 and Episode 2 once were, there’s now a message announcing, “Video has been removed at the request of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc..”

Perhaps thanks to fans bragging on Reddit about their success watching the episodes via Pornhub, the media powers that be are now cracking down on these illegally pirated videos even more.

Then again, as new streaming services continue to launch and the media landscape becomes even more fractured, many are predicting a return to the days of digital piracy. So is it any surprise that a semi-lawless platform like Pornhub could represent the future of illegal streaming?

Update: Pornhub emailed Inverse with an official statement from company vice president Corey Price:

“Pornhub is fully compliant with the law. We respect all copyright requests and once we received some notifying us of the existence of Rick and Morty videos on our site, we had them quickly removed. We happen to be big fans of the show and recommend people check it out on Adult Swim or the appropriate channels.”

Rick and Morty Season 4 airs Sunday nights on Adult Swim at 11:30 p.m. Eastern.

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