They'll block known VPN/Proxy endpoints I guess. I bet spinning up your own proxy/VPN will still work. Although they might block entire networks like EC2 and DigitalOcean too.
Honestly, I doubt they even really care. This is probably just to keep from getting screwed over in some licensing deal. "Look, we really tried hard to stop this, I guess those internet-guys are just too good at getting around the system. Oh well."
The far easier method is with DNS services, I wonder if it will affect those too or this is just an official announcement and they will not do anything drastic.
Well those work by resolving some domains (like netflix.com) to their own tunnel endpoints, which then tunnel to a different country. They can then just block the endpoints' IPs. It's actually not that hard to set up, I did it a couple of years ago to tunnel youtube (which is pretty crippled for music in Germany) and some other services not available outside of the US to a server in the US. The DNS server was in Germany to keep latency low.
Yes I see what you mean, they have their own servers to proxy but then are able to hand off the actual video traffic. So presumably Netflix knows which are the Getflix and other service tunnel endpoints. I wonder if it will escalate with Getflix and other providers attempting to bypass such blocks.
Argh. I have just that, a $5 DO droplet located in New York (I live in Sweden) that runs a Squid3 web proxy. I use this for Squid3 to not be detected as a proxy:
via off
forwarded_for off
request_header_access Allow allow all
request_header_access Authorization allow all
request_header_access WWW-Authenticate allow all
request_header_access Proxy-Authorization allow all
request_header_access Proxy-Authenticate allow all
request_header_access Cache-Control allow all
request_header_access Content-Encoding allow all
request_header_access Content-Length allow all
request_header_access Content-Type allow all
request_header_access Date allow all
request_header_access Expires allow all
request_header_access Host allow all
request_header_access If-Modified-Since allow all
request_header_access Last-Modified allow all
request_header_access Location allow all
request_header_access Pragma allow all
request_header_access Accept allow all
request_header_access Accept-Charset allow all
request_header_access Accept-Encoding allow all
request_header_access Accept-Language allow all
request_header_access Content-Language allow all
request_header_access Mime-Version allow all
request_header_access Retry-After allow all
request_header_access Title allow all
request_header_access Connection allow all
request_header_access Proxy-Connection allow all
request_header_access User-Agent allow all
request_header_access Cookie allow all
request_header_access All deny all
They don't need to know. They can show you the content that corresponds to the country matching your billing information, regardless of your IP address. It doesn't say they're going to block proxies, only that you won't be able to use proxies to watch content not available in your country.
I don't believe the content distribution rights operate that way. I think what you can see depends on where you are physically located. Not where you are from.
They could just only play video when the IP address location and billing country match. You wouldn't catch every proxy user, but it would prevent the widespread usage.
Are accounts transferrable? What if if I travel to the US and use my account there? Would I still be discriminated against, on the basis of my billing country?
I've done what you're describing here, entering a made up address is easy, it is getting payment to them without triggering fraud systems that is hard.
Many years ago US iTunes added PayPal but didn't verify that the address on the PayPal account was the same as the address on the iTunes account, so you could pay using your local billing address, but have payment go to a US iTunes fictional address. They have unfortunately closed that loophole.
Some fraud systems (like the ones at Hulu) work by verifying the Zip Code. There are algorithms for transforming foreign postal codes into an American zip code. These algorithms were designed to be used at places like gas stations in the States which often ask you to enter your zip code for verification. So to subscribe to Hulu, I transformed my postal code into a zip code, looked up an address at that zip code and used that as my billing address with my Canadian credit card.
> So to subscribe to Hulu, I transformed my postal code into a zip code, looked up an address at that zip code and used that as my billing address with my Canadian credit card.
I literally don't know what you're talking about with "transferring zip codes." But I was talking about your financial institution blocking the payment, not Hulu/NetFlix/whatever.
They should reject the transaction as soon as it comes in.
For example, the "zip code" for a Canadian Postal Code of K8Q 5T6 is 856XX, where the last two digits can be anything. So make a valid address for zip 85601, enter it into Hulu as the address for your Canadian credit card, and both Hulu and the bank will accept it as valid. (Or at least some banks will, the first card I tried didn't work. The second one did).
This would not work either legally or technically, afaik (IANAL though). You don't get a copyright pass going into another country to use content you could at home, the restrictions are on distribution to you wherever you are.
But even if that weren't true, technically it wouldn't work because people would just share their accounts with people across the border, leading to a different form of the same outcome.
The only way this would work is if you were forbidden from using your netflix account outside your home country. This would piss off a lot of travellers (like me) who consider it literally a feature that their netflix account works in other countries, and are currently using the service in a legitimate way (as we see the local content wherever we are).
If only that's how it worked, I'd be very happy. I'm a US resident and all my billing info is in the US, but I travel frequently.
It's infuriating that I can't continue watching a TV show or movie just because I happened to cross a national border. For now, I use a proxy to always have access to US content, but if Netflix starts blocking that I'm going to cancel my account.
If they are serious, they could tie your account to your country, so when you are in "another country", either virtually or physically, you could only watch things available in both you account's country and your access country.
Do whois on ip address, there are addresses that belong to data centers, so between that an manually compiling a list of netmasks belonging to various proxy providers you can get something going. Not without failure I guess.
Reuters may be botching up terminology. Perhaps Netflix closing the door on regional workarounds using DNS redirects. Failing that, Netflix may block service to IP subsets owned by popular Proxy services only. If you set up a proxy using your own machine or a smaller service, it may still work.
More importantly, how are they to know what country lies on the other end of the tunnel, so that they could determine what is not available locally there?
I think this is a bit of hand-waving to placate certain rights holders. If subscribers who VPN from the U.S. to the U.S.--perhaps for privacy purposes--are affected, and they make enough noise, Netflix will likely back off to "well, at least we tried" intensity.
If they are not providing you with the service that you have paid them to provide, you should contact customer service and request that the problem be fixed, and that you be refunded for the duration of the failure.
IP addresses do not have a fixed physical location or a fixed purpose. They are packet routing instructions, period.
Netflix doesn't need to block 100% of proxies - they just need blocking that's good enough that people licensing content to them won't sue or withdraw their content.
Figuring out the IP addresses used by free and commercial proxies shouldn't be too hard - they just need to create some test accounts, sign up for the proxy services, then check what IP addresses their test accounts appeared to connect from. That'll block anyone who isn't technical enough to set up their own server.
If they're feeling enthusiastic enough, they could go further - for example blocking IP ranges used by big hosting providers and seedbox providers; and monitor the main forums and subreddits to learn about any new bypasses they need to clamp down on.
That already exists. You could spin up a VPS on any provider and install OpenVPN. If you're technical enough to spin up a VPS then you can get this up and running in 5 minutes.
What I want (and would pay for) in a proxy service is one that would use a different address each time, preferably from "normal" ip ranges for subscribers in that country.
I'm guessing they are going to use a service that provides a list of proxy ips, and block those. It won't be complete, but it will cover the vast majority.
Someone should build a p2p proxy system specifically for Netflix. It would be pretty hard to block, and the risk for hosts would be low if it was limited to netflix ips only.
"How are they going to do this? I mean, anyone could spin up a machine located in the US within a few minutes - how would they know?"
They can't. They can identify commercial proxy providers and the IP blocks they utilize and block them. Maybe they can auto-identify subnets based on their ARIN registration text ... it's still just a wack-a-mole process.
If you own your own IP space in the US that you use for your own purposes, it will presumably work forever.
Or, put another way, if you are truly a peer on the Internet, you can continue to do the things it was meant for. If not, you're just a media consumer.
Why doesn't Netflix make their own original content available globally (to subscribers)? I had assumed that terms of licensing agreements were what prevented global access to most content.
Because that content was also licensed by Netflix to other companies. House of Cards, for example, was licensed to companies in Australia, New Zealand, Germany, India, and others before Netflix's arrival there, and when Netflix did arrive in those places, those licensing agreements were still in place, meaning Netflix couldn't make its own content available in those countries.
This is basically the only reason they are cracking down at all. I'm sure Netflix doesn't care, but if the rights holders see them as being "soft" on proxy use then they might charge more or sue. They will block what is easy to block so they can point and say "hey look, we tried!"
Because nation states have various censorship requirements for these services to continue to exist in their jurisdiction. "watch content not available in their home country" is the key phrase here. If you want to watch something that has been deemed 'unfit' for the masses by the local law, Netflix has to follow those laws.
Licensing agreements are another problem, but this one looks to be specifically about catering to local law. There are probably also issues with production company contracts, entertainment union contracts, etc even if Netflix "owns" the show. Wikipedia lists four different production companies alone for "House of Cards." Then there are probably issues with at least SAG-AFTRA, WGAW, DGA, ASCAP for music/score licensing, etc. These are all stakeholders with, usually, strong contractual rights to the IP.
A customer in some countries (USA, major EU countries, etc) is entitled to the ability to pay for certain content. Why shouldn't GP be entitled to the same thing? Is their money and advertising-eyeball-hours worth less? This isn't to say regional differences don't exist (you can't gift games between some countries on Steam due to currency / local market prices). When you want to pay for content though, and the option is just not there, I think entitlement is the wrong word.
Perhaps you should direct that to the European Commission.
"Tackling geo-blocking: Geo-blocking leaves many Europeans unable to use the online services available in other EU countries, or redirects them to a local store with different prices. This is often done without any justification. Such discrimination cannot exist in a single market."
Prior to last week, Netflix did not operate in all countries. In the countries you couldn't sign up for Netflix, Netflix licensed its content to other distributors/networks to make it available locally. The content won't be available on their local Netflix service until those exclusive licenses expire. Going forward, now that Netflix is available everywhere, they won't need or want to license out their original content like that, since they can distribute it themselves.
Netflix doesn't own all of its Netflix published content. Sony owns House of Cards. Lionsgate owns Orange is the New Black.
Netflix's early tv productions deals were similar to how regular TV purchased content. You custom order the show, but you only get "first run" rights. The production company keeps the rights to international markets and even re-run rights.
In the USA, you can buy House of Cards episodes from Comcast and Netflix doesn't get a penny for it.
This is unlike, say HBO, which owns control control of the content they create.
Because media companies didn't pay for these apples in Ireland to being with. The original authors of content sold these apples to Netflix to sell in America, but sold it to other local companies in Ireland, because these other local companies offered them a better deal than Netflix. By not detecting proxies, Netflix essentially sold something they didn't purchase in the first place.
Studios may already have setup distribution rights to other media companies in those countries. Universal Studios may give Netflix the Indiana Jones series for the US but Universal already has a distribution agreement with Company X in the UK for those films. They can't give Netflix UK the rights to distribute because there is probably a contract term that says Universal won't undermine Company X's distribution rights. Thus, Universal Studios has a contract term with Netflix US to block any other countries from watching those films otherwise someone is going to get in trouble. Universal Studios would need negotiate a new contract with Company X and take away their exclusive rights and give Netflix UK digital rights.
The content is one thing, but I could live with country based restrictions. What I'm afraid is the availability of subtitles.
I'm from a country in Northern Europe and live in a country in Central Europe. I want my movies and series without dubbing, and with English subtitles. US Netflix has been a perfect solution for this.
As I understand the subtitles are usually licensed from different people than the producers of the shows, so yes it is probably licensing issues too.
As an example on Netflix Italy you can watch Lie To Me with Italian or English audio, but the subtitles are only available in Italian. If you switch to a UK proxy you get English subtitles...
Well, considering the fact that on US Netflix I can access 6000 titles and local Netflix doesn't even have 500 (and most of them aren't anything I'm interested in) that pretty much just means I'll stop paying the subscription :/
Since there's pretty much no other source of most of the shows locally except for buying extremely expensive BluRays I guess people will just revert to torrenting.
I somehow doubt you'll be able to persuade the young population to stop watching any shows (no other streaming services are available due to small size of the country here) or to start watching Mexican soap operas on broadcast TV.
Especially when torrents are readily available in HD and fiber internet connection rather widely available.
Also since most of the streaming licensing deals kinda forget about most EU countries except the 5 biggest ones, the sympathies towards the copyright holders are kinda running low. You can show a middle finger to people in a country so many times before they stop caring about your copyright licensing deals.
I doubt it too, but I'm willing to waste the karma on putting it forth as a valid alternative.
I don't know when everybody got so entitled that they were willing to go through whatever means necessary to get access to content otherwise unavailable to them, but it boggles my mind how comfortably everybody seems able to justify it.
So you suggest that people in smaller countries should just shut up and accept that they are second class citizens in the modern world? These are people that are very able and very willing to pay for content -- they just have no way to do so.
Plenty of people never bought into the idea that an entity could own a sequence of bytes. Until you understand this you'll continue to not understand why people have such an easy time getting content that you think they "just shouldn't watch".
To the contrary, I understand it perfectly, I just don't agree with it.
There are plenty of people who think that think gay people shouldn't be allowed to be married. I understand that too, and also disagree. Just because a lot of people think something doesn't make it right.
It took real people time, money and effort to make the shows that others are pirating, and to my mind at least, their efforts entitle them more to it than my "need" to watch it entitles me to pirate it.
> but it boggles my mind how comfortable everybody seems able to justify it.
> To the contrary, I understand it perfectly, I just don't agree with it.
I don't really understand how it can 'boggle your mind' while you still understand it. Mind-boggling implies that it's surprising to you, which it shouldn't be.
Don't get me wrong, while I do not entirely agree with your point of view, I understand it. But to describe it as mind-boggling would be both inconsistent and perhaps a bit condescending. It seems to me that it would be better to express understanding and then explain why you disagree, rather they to pretend 'being startled'.
Fair point. i made my earlier point poorly, as I didn't respond to your post in context (but rather as its own entity).
In the same way that I understand the appeal of, say, scientology (e.g., You are a superior being, and with just a little help, we can make you far more successful, rich in pocket, body, spirit, blah blah), but it still boggles the mind that people fall for it.
I understand the appeal to self-justify taking something from another that you want more. I understand the appeal of copying something you don't own, or can't buy, which doesn't physically "take" anything away from the owner. I understand those things just fine. What I don't understand is how low the lack of respect for your fellow man has to be that they can create something, not give it to you, and that isn't a deterrent from just taking it anyway.
Even if I accept the argument that it doesn't take anything from the owner (which I don't), and that a given copy of data is nothing more than a secret a friend won't tell me, I still respect other people enough that I'm not going to dig through their things until their secrets are mine.
The thing is that it still strikes me as rather arrogant to compare pirating to something like scientology, or imply that it is 'respectless' to my fellow man. Even just based on this HN thread, there's probably a huge part of society that is 1) intelligent, 2) conscientious, and 3) does not consider pirating a big crime. I just need to look at myself and the vast majority of my friends to confirm this.
I could defend my point of view by saying that I would simply not download certain things if there was no easy way to do so, but clearly we disagree on this issue. But arguing that it's 'simply' lack of respect for your fellow man and 'simply' taking does not do the issue justice.
Either it is as simple as you say, and all of us who pirate are lesser creatures than yourself (which would be convenient to conclude), or it's not as simple as you say. I don't really see how there's a third option, and that's the problem I had with your comment.
It was (probably a poor) analogy, not a comparison. I was simply trying to come up with something else that is both understandable to me, and yet still mind boggling. I was definitely not attempting to conflate the two.
As for the rest, it's very possible that despite how much thought I've put into it, I'm completely wrong.
Offtopic, but your focus on the word "simply" made me wonder if I'd said it. I hadn't, so I'm curious as to the focus on it.
To me, if someone creates (or has) something unique, and doesn't want someone else to have it, then they should not. It doesn't matter to me whether it's freely available on the pirate bay, or locked up in their sock drawer; they created it, not me, and if they want me to have it, they'll either give it to me, or make it available to me to purchase.
Anything else violates their wishes on their thing.
> To me, if someone creates (or has) something unique, and doesn't want someone else to have it, then they should not.
This is an extraordinary amount of personalized respect to give faceless companies who are literally only acting as they do in order to extract the maximum amount of money from "content" they did not create.
I think this is where a lot of people will disagree with you. Personally, I don't believe a person who created something should get that level of control. It's fine to control your possessions, i.e. things that can belong to only one person at the same time, and that happen to belong to you now. But I see absolutely no reason for which you should be able to control information. Not just music or games, and not just digital. Information - as abstract as it gets.
That is, if you and only yourself have it, it's of course immoral for me to coerce you to give it to me, or to take it from you against your will. But if you give (a copy of) that information to a third party, the third party now owns a copy, and should have the same rights about it as you have. Which includes giving that information to me, for free.
There's no other way for it to work that makes sense. Just like you don't have a right to tell something to someone and then issue a gag order, you shouldn't have such right to any other form of information.
Of course, exceptions are being made because of the economy, but then let's be clear - piracy is bad because of economic reasons, not moral ones. Morally you're privileged by being able to limit distribution of information in the first place.
Fair enough. You didn't say 'simply'; I just wanted to emphasize that the problem I have is that you appear to be reducing something that opinions are clearly divided on, and something that I'd say is clearly complicated, to a 'simple' matter.
> To me, if someone creates (or has) something unique, and doesn't want someone else to have it, then they should not. It doesn't matter to me whether it's freely available on the pirate bay, or locked up in their sock drawer; they created it, not me, and if they want me to have it, they'll either give it to me, or make it available to me to purchase.
That's what I would call an argument that comes across as 'simple'. Self-evident, almost. But because so many intelligent, moral people disagree, there's probably some element in there that you're oversimplifying (from the perspective of those who hold a different point of view). Not acknowledging that is what bothered me, but of course it's fair enough if you hold this view and express it as your perspective.
Anyways, I do see your point, and I do respect it. The way I see it, nobody can fault you for choosing to be more 'restrictive' or 'narrow' in your ethical framework (where 'narrow' is not meant as an insult)!
Commercial software (with a long tradition) is based on that idea. And Free software is based on the same idea, only that you renounce to that ownership right.
Free software is a hack on a legal system to provide something that should work this way by default. And commercial software could get away with being based on that idea because they could enforce it, and only as long as they could.
Which is why at first it worked, then it stopped thanks to the Internet, and now it's working again, because everyone's moving to SaaS model. Which, by the way, is a step backwards in progress.
Not "taking things that don't belong to them", "seeing things others don't want them to". The reason it seems strange to you isn't a difference in morals or ethics but framing.
I think that possession is the essence of property rights. People have a real viceral reaction when you come and take something out of their house, or out of their hand.
However, copying no matter how perfect isn't the same kind of infringement under law or common morals.
If someone peeks at your house, then builds a perfect replica on their own land then you may be sad that you lost the uniqueness of your properly without their paying you for the privilege of copying it... But it's not "piracy", and will hardly cause a pitchfork mob to form outside your neighbors newly copied house.
It's hard to believe you have ever used YouTube, Netflix or Google Play TV in a small country. For current TV shows, your options are usually to watch them as they air, or not watch them at all.
This even includes stuff for which Netflix is the original distributor, like House of Cards, because they may have licensed the content exclusively to a broadcast TV station.
I think it's a difference in scale. It's one thing for everyone to shrug off lack of a single service, but people aren't going wait 3-5 years for every show heavily marketed to them on the internet.
Blocking things geographically didn't work in socialist times before 1990 and expecting it to work now is rather naive :/
That plus the ease of spoilers that people toss around online, under the assumption that anybody who was going to watch a show is caught up by now.
Good luck watching A Game of Thrones 5 years behind everyone else without hearing who dies.
I haven't kept up with it, but I heard allll about a particular Stark last season (details omitted on the off chance that someone else hasn't). Even from newspapers and congresspeople on that one, IIRC.
I absolutely hate online publications that try too hard to hide the spoiler by saying "Here's what really happened to <X> last season", or "X didn't die!!" Umm.. saying X didn't die in Game of Thrones is already a spoiler.
Oh my god do I hate those. I was a week or two late on the Star Wars train recently, and had to basically stop visiting Facebook because of all the clickbait headlines that they stuff into newsfeeds.
<vague spoiler warning if anyone hasn't seen it yet>
...
...
"THIS CHARACTER WAS ORIGINALLY MARKED FOR DEATH IN STAR WARS THE FORCE AWAKENS!"
Ok, sure, you didn't give me a name, but going into the movie after reading that made it pretty fucking obvious.
I'm not, by nature, spoiler adverse. But the issue is that there just genuinely is only so long you can hold out from learning about a twist or a cliffhanger if you're interested in it. A shock TV moment is not good for each individual viewer, but works once for the whole population of viewers.
This works well as an aesthetic device for popular culture, where the purpose is in large part to catch the zeitgeist in the short term. I don't want to sound snobbish about this - Charles Dickens was a master of this type of thing, after all, and his present reputation as a Great Writer In English Literature would amuse and appall the snobs of his day, if they only knew. The best parts of mass popular culture endure after everyone knows he's his father, or its a sled, or little Nell dies.
That's interesting. I read the books many moons ago, and have mostly ignored the TV show (till next season, because George is taking too long). I never heard about said Stark (reasonably certain I know which one) from anyone in popular culture.
That being said, I've never been good at keeping up with popular culture ;)
Yeah, and if we're discussing unethical things people justify to themselves, let's not forget that we do rationalize advertising. Which is doubly relevant here, because it's the heavy-handed advertising that makes our culture so tightly connected to commercial works of art.
I understand how you can feel that it's important to follow rules, but why is it baffling that people are comfortable taking something that is infinitely copyable (and thus, the theft deprives no one else) when the seller will sell it to their neighbors but not to them?
I think the concept of being left behind culturally is an interesting one, and may have increasing negative effects in people's lives. A couple simple examples would be in business (can't schmooze with a potential client about the latest TV show) or relationships (can't identify with someone you're dating over music or films).
... or feeling left out (you can't participate in a conversation with friends or cow-orkers, who are fans of the show you couldn't legally see yet). Or feeling disconnected from the global culture - after all, we have XXI century, a big part of the global population lives in a shared culture. Not being able to relate to what your US friends are talking about, or what their news articles say, is also a problem.
it boggles my mind how comfortable everybody seems able to justify it.
I expect and tolerate a certain level of lawbreaking from teens and pre-"settling down" young adults.
Categorically, I put piracy somewhere among underage drinking, using soft drugs, and irresponsible vehicle operation. The pettiest of petty crime. Do those boggle your mind too?
I don't expect anyone to inherently respect IP law in the portions of their life where they're broke. Unless someone close to them makes money off of copywritten material.
I would almost certainly not choose to prosecute someone hungry for stealing my food. I might even steal food from another if I or my family were hungry enough. There's a need there that, if unsatisfied by any other option, is resolved through theft, and I accept that just fine.
We're not talking about food though, we're talking about Orange is the New Black, which is far from a necessity.
Beyond that, if I thought it was just broke teens pirating, then I probably wouldn't feel the need to speak up, but it's not nearly limited to that demographic. I have six-figure-income, grown up friends who swap pirated seasons of TV shows and in-theater movies with each other on Plex.
Your friends also probably regularly exceed the speed limit on the freeway. This could have potentially deadly consequences, so is arguably a much worse crime than non-commercial copyright infringement. But both crimes are socially acceptable, so they do it.
No, they don't. I have 35-year old friends who make upwards of $150k, and still pirate movies and TV shows. But they're smart enough to stay within the speed limit. They said it was something about the probability of dying being really high while speeding, and them wanting to stay alive...
There is not much that can go wrong while driving in a straight line at constant speed. The actions they take to get around you (braking, lane changes) create a great deal more opportunities for collision.
Speed doesn't kill, speed differentials do. You should not go drastically slower than the speed of traffic for the same reason you shouldn't go drastically faster than it.
Speed differentials, and loss of control at cruising speed. A 5 mph tap and a 5 mph relative tap at 60 mph on a highway with a slight (for the speed) bend are two entirely different things.
We can't have the same social circle then I have similar age friends making far less money that used to pirate films (when they made no money) but now pay for them. They almost all speed though.
> Your friends also probably regularly exceed the speed limit on the freeway.
At least on trips I've taken to the US, people there seem a lot more inclined to stay within the speed limits than they are in Europe. Take a trip on a UK motorway where there isn't heavy traffic, and you'll find at least 50% of people are going over the 70mph limit.
> Beyond that, if I thought it was just broke teens pirating, then I probably wouldn't feel the need to speak up, but it's not nearly limited to that demographic. I have six-figure-income, grown up friends who swap pirated seasons of TV shows and in-theater movies with each other on Plex.
Yes, but you are an American who largely has legal access to the content at a reasonable price in relation to your income.
That isn't true of some guy in Mexico who makes $5k/year and is Region 4 with Australia.
The age-old question: why is it not easiest to be honest? Until that is fixed they'll get zero sympathy from most of us.
Also from the international perspective, consider if shows were available in California, but not Nevada. Artificially limiting an information product due to geography is a quaint 20th century idea.
Humans are social animals and have a need for cultural interaction. There is plenty of historical examples where groups has been denied this, like slaves being forbidden to play music, or cults that forbade children to access books, radio and TV, and the negative impact has been studied to a certain degree. I have read about lack of culture being linked with increased violence, less social abilities, lower income later in life, and (obviously) lower creativity in the arts. With that comes social isolation which has direct health impact with increased stress and other really bad symptoms.
If a person take it upon themselves to eliminate the disadvantage from being poor by accessing culture illegally, which has no harmful impact to anything or anyone physically, then I don't blame them, especially if they are a child. Its not their fault that the incentive model of culture demands that poor people must be denied access in order to force rich people to pay.
We don't need much of anything other than some minimum amount of food, water and the ability to sleep somewhere. Roads, clothes, education, healthcare, music, etc are all optional.
Why so? Not allowing me to go to the movies because I'm an Australian would be considered racist. Why is it more acceptable to do so with streaming content?
Love/belonging includes feeling a part of society. In today world where culture is global (especially for so called millennials) consuming that culture is part of feeling that you are part of society.
And most people are very happy (and very able) to pay for that. So why not sell/rent it to them?
But you do have social needs, that for civilized humans take form of the need to participate in your local culture. Local culture, which today is heavily based on current TV shows. Thus being up to date with TV shows becomes a need.
If someone told you, you couldn't do something, and the reasoning was some arbitrary, thinly veiled assertion of power over you, also this person is one of those types that always seems to find their way in such power despite everyone else preference to the contrary, but you had the means to easily bypass their authority. Wouldn't you be just a little tempted?
Keep in mind this is perhaps one of the few cases were you aren't totally powerless.
Those reasons are because of negotiating local deals, or to prevent access to the content immediately to push up prices artificially. We do actually know the reasons, and it doesn't make things any better.
It is arbitrary. It's a quirk of scarcity economy. If content creators didn't need to trade off time spent on creating content for time spent on earning their bread, we wouldn't have this discussion. And while I sympathize with content creators here, we've turned this into a machine for big companies to print money. At this point, if the crude hack doesn't even serve its purpose, why should people care?
The thing is, if a piece of IP is not available in a country, and given the fact that it might be worthless by next season, is distributing that IP for free for that year in the country a bad karma? If anything, when the production house does license out in that country, they can run the current season directly as population has already watched earlier ones.
If anything, this should push production houses to work better with rights distribution. In India, that's already happening with "Premier" channels which run seasons alongside US counterparts. For shows that appear on now Premier channels, I have not torrented a single one. I am also sure that if not for rampant torrenting, this would have never happened.
Internet is a great leveller. Take a deep breath, let it in. By the time we all have gray hair, this will be long sorted out. You can't lock down IP by country in 2016. If you built a system that loses money if it leaks internationally, it's your fault. Next, try to build a business model that has more chances of survival than chances of sand retaining in your fist.
The real problem is that people still expect a century old business model to work. If it doesn't, they lose their minds.
If a tree falls in another part of the world, and nobody saw it, nobody visited that forest for 10 years, nobody wanted to use that wood, did it really fall? Did American oak planters lose money because of it?
People often ask me: "If there were no copyright law, how would studios earn money?"
What artists and moviemakers could do is, sell the right to see contents before others. Assuming that DRM is cracked and leaked after some time and will inevitably fall into the "public domain", users would not buy "a song" or "a movie", but the lifestyle of watching it directly out from the factory, while others would have to wait until it's cracked.
When the season 2, 3 and 4 of Arrow aren't available in Europe, we know that Netflix isn't selling the lifestyle of being up-to-date with fashion.
People often ask me: "If there were no copyright law, how would studios earn money?"
They'd work on commission. They'd work on crowd-funded commission. If you want a movie made, you pay for it yourself. If you want to watch a movie that's already been made, why shouldn't that be free? The work has already been done and paid for.
Cars and houses and food are physical goods (and in at least two of your examples, fungible and/or life-sustaining) with distribution costs, intrinsic value, and scarcity.
Netflix seems to spend a fortune in encoding and distributing this type of content. I think that distribution may not always be as simple of a problem and should not be marginalised as such. Especially if you consider the numbers in terms of demand and quality expectations for such services.
Literal thousands of people are distributing various content, for free, right now. Out of sheer altruism most of the time - they get nothing back after their initial download. Pick your favorite torrent site.
The fact that the business landscape wouldn't tolerate this as a legitimate method is a failure of ego and imagination, not something inherent to the system.
You did it in the least effective way possible. Once I pay for a car and my food, I never pay for it again if I don't want to. In fact, I've never paid for my food more than once.
If you have a point, you need to find a better way of making it.
Yes when I want a car I buy one (i.e. pay for it to be made). The OP is suggesting that film studios operate the same model.
Personally I disagree, I don't think the current model is so broken that it can't be fixed. Although some things about it are just plain dumb. The primary part that is almost comical in this case is the bit where content owners refuse to make the extra money that they could so easily make by selling/renting to the millions of people that want to pay them and instead spend a fortune on "public relations" and copyright trolling.
> Internet is a great leveller
I hope that the increased connectivity of our world will have a profound impact on the legal constructs utilised by parties to secure earnings. As you, I also hope that we will have worked through the issues by the time I'm old, but history tells me that profit is a great motivator to keep archaic constructs intact. Today's world is filled with business models that don't fit our somewhat more globalised reality. The money talks.
>I don't know when everybody got so entitled that they were willing to go through whatever means necessary to get access to content otherwise unavailable to them
If I'm willing to pay you for it, why can't I have it? What reason is there to deny me the ability to access culture if I'm willing to pay?
Is it because I was (without any choice of mine) born in the wrong country?
Am I entitled for being born in the wrong country? That sounds more like snobbery from people born in the "right" country.
Countries are an instrument of discrimination. Denying access to culture is one of the milder aspects. People born in the wrong country are locked out of many rights others take for granted, even human rights. The nation state system is inherently immoral because it sets up castes of people by birth with little recourse for moving to a higher caste. That's why i think democratic forces will eventually get rid of the concept of independent sovereign states and lead to a globally harmonized system of human rights and obligations. And maybe then we'll finally all be able to watch the new game of thrones episodes at the same time as americans.
Thank you for posting that. I think it's definitely important to recognize that if you like art, and want it to continue to exist, then it should be worth paying for.
Even acknowledging that musicians are exempt from a lot of what I consider good arguments in that piracy is effectively a marketing cost (because piracy does help them attract new fans, who might go to shows they can't pirate, etc., etc.), it just never seemed right to me to use other people's things in ways they did not want me to.
> it just never seemed right to me to use other people's things in ways they did not want me to.
I think you let it go. You can't capture all the value you create. It's not how living in a society works. All our culture is based on taking someone else's work and changing it, combining with other works and sprinkling a little of your own insight. You can trace every movie ever made back through other movies, then through songs, performances and literature, pretty much back to earliest recorded history. This is partly because "nothing is new under the Sun", but mostly because works of art are enjoyed within a cultural context. If you quote Shakespeare in your movie, you don't do that just because the words feel kind of nice. You're both basing off Shakespeare's work, and - by doing so - you're purposefully making the audience evaluate your movie within the context of Shakespeare's writings, which you probably expect to bring them more enjoyment. And Shakespeare did the same by taking from the writings of his predecessors, etc.
I like the response to the letter that 'hotgoldminer linked. I appreciate the reality, that artists want to earn money too. Personally, I pretty much don't pirate stuff anymore, and I'm happy to financially support authors (and middlemen, though I'm not happy about supporting those who are just rent-seeking). But I disagree on the fundamental moral principle. I think that expecting to be paid per copy of an information that's copyable pretty much for free is not a moral right. It's at best a temporary privilege, though one that people got used to before we had digital technology.
I think the right word to use is "culture", not "content". Copyright giants have spent fortunes consolidating the majority of cultural expression into a few enormous conglomerates. They then spend another fortune making sure that their latest X dominates everything people see and hear.
After doing all that, if they expect a group (e.g. a non-US country, or students who can't afford cable) to stop participating in the bought-and-paid-for culture that can't be avoided, that group will find a way to participate anyway.
It's not entitlement to want to be able to participate in the dominant cultural trends (made dominant by consolidation and advertising).
How is it not being entitled to say, "I want to create something and allow everyone but you to buy it based on your location, and I expect you to respect that wish"?
Circumventing the content creators wishes just because you can do so without getting arrested, because you are too cheap, or some other nonsense excuse is entitled.
But why should people care? You've created it, you've released it, it's out there. Bits are copied for free. People usually are nice enough to pay you for it, but if you (or your middlemen) are not willing to give it to people who want to pay for it, then they'll find another way to see it.
Few things that are crucial to this:
- digital content is copyable for pretty much free by its very nature;
- we're talking about copying, not stealing
- we're talking about information, creative content, which kind of works differently than physical items
Expecting to create a piece of information, give it to some people and then still being able to retain exclusive control over that thing is what sounds entitled to me. It infringes on other peoples' right to process what reaches their senses and do whatever they like with it.
Intellectual property is an ugly hack created to make creative works compatible with market economy. The absurdity of that solution finally became visible as the marginal cost of copying the medium dropped to almost zero. Yes, we need the hack because many content creators need to get paid (and to believe they will get paid if they invest time in creating), but ultimately it's a problem with the economy. Ultimately, we should strive to fix it on the economy side, and get rid of the IP altogether.
Also, if we're comparing divine rights with each other then sorry, culture > capitalism. Humanity is better-off this way.
Your argument seems to be "it can be done so it must be right" and you view the rights of those who want to view something over those who put their time and work into it. Why do you think people should not get paid for their work?
Game of Thrones is not "information". It is not a basic human right. "Humanity" is no better off if you can watch it now or in a weeks time.
GoT, for better or worse, is a massive part of contemporary popular culture. Why do you think people should not be allowed to pay for it just because of where they were born? It's like saying, "Here's what you are expected to talk about and experience, and you're not invited because you're Ukrainian/British/Egyptian/etc."
I could agree if it was a case of being too cheap, but I am referring to when content providers refuse to release their content in an area. Shows coming out a year later in Australia for example. And just waiting for it to come out is not acceptable when the rest of the world is discussing it. People want to pay for the content but they are not given an option to, so I don't see how pirating is stemming from entitlement
"go through whatever means necessary" sounds like questionable rhetoric to support your position. The difficulty involved in torrenting is quite low and there's arguably little moral reason to avoid doing so in this case since the problem is these people usually aren't allowed to purchase the content.
You've gone through significant effort to PAY for content because you enjoy it and respect its creators, yet you are nevertheless rebuffed. They don't want your money, simply because of where you live (nothing personal). You can now either steal that show or abstain - oh and that pang of bewildered insult that you feel, you're not entitled to it, the law is the law.
Somehow I'm having a bit of difficulty empathizing with the law here.
I don't know if you perhaps have an extremely diplomatic outlook, or if it's HN's new negativity rules, or maybe you're just British, but I'm chuckling at your "having a bit of difficulty empathizing" quote here. I think you can go ahead and say that the law is broken and stupid.
FWIW, I freely agree that the laws are largely stupid in relation to the issue at hand. My argument is not "because it's illegal". My argument is that the something in question doesn't belong to me, and hence, I have no entitlement to it.
Pardon the repetition, as I already stated this elsewhere, but if you had a really juicy secret that you wouldn't give to me, I wouldn't take that either, even knowing full well that if I take your secret, you still have the secret. I respect the rights of others to do whatever they wish with their things, whether those things are property, digital goods, or secrets. If they want me to have it, they'll make it available to me. Until they do, then I have no entitlement.
I don't quite follow. The law is, as you say, stupid and makes no sense. You are saying that you are breaking the law in regards to property though, so don't do it. So your argument is "because it's illegal".
Incidentally, in many countries of the world - it's not illegal to bypass geoblocking.
Wouldn't buying DVDs and the appropriate DVD player from a different region and importing them also qualify as evading geoblocking? Is that illegal in some countries?
Personally I disagree with your view on the state of digital content.
First of all, I think that this level of control over released information is something a person should not be entitled to. Not in principle, on the fundamental-rights level. If you created something and gave it away, you should lose control over it, period. This is the only way society can develop itself - it's how new art is created ("every artist copies"), it's how science is being made ("standing on the shoulders of giants").
Secondly, let me explore your example of telling a secret. If you tell a secret to someone, and then someone goes behind your back and tells the secret to me, then your gripe is not with me - it's with the person you told the secret to. Similarly with piracy, I'm not downloading the content from your servers. Someone else is offering it to me. It's not my duty to ask where did he get that information from. Please, if you must, go after that someone else.
Now I understand the need to control some of this behavior in order to make it easier for people to pay for their food by creating information. But let's be clear about it - as a society, we're doing it as a favor to the creator. He's not entitled to copy rights, it's a gift that's meant to encourage people to spend their time creating instead of earning money in another way. It's a side effect of scarcity economy. In a world where one doesn't have to pay for basic living expenses, there's little to no reason to have such control on information copying. If you created it and gave it away, it's no longer yours.
Now so that we've established (just assume it even if you disagree) that the whole IP thing is just a side effect of our economy, it follows that:
- one should not be trying to make a moral issue out of it, beyond making sure the content creator isn't completely screwed - but that's because of basic human decency
- like with all other negative side effects of economy, we need to fix it
Which means, it's the IP, not piracy, needs to go away.
>it boggles my mind how comfortably everybody seems able to justify it.
People perform any number of mental gymnastics in order to justify their own interests. I'm reading A Struggle for Power right now and the 10 years before the American Revolution was basically one long exercise in mental gymnastics by both sides.
We act on our interests and justify them post facto.
I'm not sure how old you are, but until movie studios began matching global release schedules piracy was the norm. This story is amusing because this is about people actually paying for content.
Hollywood along with every other major content producer has a marketing reach which is global. If people in these countries did not want to see the new Star Wars or listen to the latest American pop star it means that the marketing sucks! So what you are imaging is a world where the content producers are basically telling their potential audience to go F themselves.
There are underlying moral issues to this story. The first is censorship and blocking access to certain groups of IP blocks. Clearly this is getting written in to content licensing contracts and that's too bad. If an IP address is not doing something hostile it should not be blocked. The second involves asking extremely poor people for more money. Someone that makes $190 a month just isn't going to be paying the US market rate to consume content nor should they - and that absolutely is different than getting a below market or price subsidized physical product or item.
I'm not sure how old you are, but until movie studios began matching global release schedules piracy was the norm. This story is amusing because this is about people actually paying for content.
Hollywood along with every other major content producer has a marketing reach which is global. If people in these countries did not want to see the new Star Wars or listen to the latest American pop star it means that the marketing sucks! So what you are imaging is a world where the content producers are basically telling their potential audience to go F themselves.
There are underlying moral issues to this story. The first is censorship and blocking access to certain groups of IP blocks. Clearly this is getting written in to content licensing contracts and that's too bad. If an IP address is not doing something hostile it should not be blocked. The second involves asking extremely poor people for more money. Someone that makes $190 a month just isn't going to be paying the US market rate to consume content nor should they - and that absolutely is different than getting a below market or price subsidized physical product or item.
It's rather the studios being stupid and backward. They have a great product that many potential customers are keen to get, but they will not sell it to them (even though it is just bytes so the marginal production costs are close to zero). These same potential customers have an illegal but easy to use alternative to get this product. Guess what they will do... It doesn't take an MBA to realise the studios keep shooting themselves in the foot despite the foot having so many holes already one can see through it!
I guess some people might be approaching this from a place of entitlement and justification like you say.
But you should consider that my experience is most people view the idea that some for-profit entity owns culture or can tell them that it's immoral to share media with each other to be laughable.
Like if HN decided that any criticism of products posted here was unacceptable and someone called those who still posted constructive criticism "entitled".
I'm not saying it's that simple, but understanding the viewpoint will help you understand what's going on.
I'm trying to think of a time when people were not happy to consume whatever content was available to them. The history of media technology has been the history of people duplicating works other people wished they wouldn't. Historically many famous authors had their copyrights ignored an unauthorized works distributed.
> go through whatever means necessary
That's a melodramatic way of describing "google it, click the first likely result, click a button, wait a few minutes".
> it boggles my mind how comfortably everybody seems able to justify it
In this case we're talking about people not being allowed to purchase content. This isn't a dirty hippy waving an "information wants to be free" sign, it's a frustrated professional being told their money is no good if they want to watch the new Game of Thrones season everyone is talking about. I'm not saying they're right, but it's not hard to see how they're able to internally justify it.
I'm currently in a small non-US country, and I have a US netflix subscription that goes through a proxy, which my girlfriend, in particular, adores. If Netflix forces us onto the very mediocre local version, my girlfriend will be upset. And she's going to torrent the shows she wanted to watch so she can follow the developments and talk about them with her friends in the states. Does that boggle your mind? Is the a terrible entitled person? Maybe. But I think it's pretty universal.
> I don't know when everybody got so entitled that they were willing to go through whatever means necessary to get access to content otherwise unavailable to them
Why is it entitled to work around discriminatory behaviour based on country of origin?
If I went to your physical store and you said "Sorry, no Mexicans, we only sell to American residents" I wouldn't have any issue getting the products through another channel.
In fact hopefully my actions will help ruin any attempt at making a profit by engaging in such scummy discrimination and so I actually have a moral imperative to get the products through another channel.
Probably because the justification goes as far as "I'm doing something some random megacorp doesn't want me to do" - and the average person could care less what a bunch of faceless millionaires (most of the time) think about what they do.
Let's just throw the legalistic argument out in advance. It holds as much weight in people's minds as the speed limit does.
Availability is part of it yes.
Another part of it is respect, and the media industry has a systemic problem with showing any to its paying customers. Those in charge have yet to realize that all the DRM, all these systems serve to inconvenience people who want to give them money in the first place - and I think the idea that people can be chided into giving due deference to the whims of huge corporations when said corporations won't even do something as simple as sell usable product, is just a bit backwards.
Yet another part of it is practicality, and XKCD says it better than I can: https://xkcd.com/488/
I don't know when everybody got so entitled that they were willing to go through whatever means necessary to get access to content otherwise unavailable to them
People been smuggling English bands on vinyl into the USSR and making their own copies "on the bones" last time when vinyl was big (and so was the USSR). So I suggest that maybe 50 years ago?
I pay for 3 streaming services and do so because I want to pay for content. If a company that uses the internet to advertise to a broad and international audience then makes it so I can't give them money for their content, then they never considered me as an income source and haven't lost a thing. I however have lost the ability to participate in the discussion about that item of pop culture.
I agree that piracy is theft, but on the flip side, if you're actively withholding content from my demographic (nationality) that you allow other demographics access to, then you're actively discriminating against me. Digital services here in Australia are particularly peculiar - entertainment generally gets here well after everywhere else (through official channels, that is), yet when it does, it's much more expensive and often of poorer quality.
Is that discrimination the worst thing in the world in the context of entertainment media? No. But then again, neither is the resultant piracy of the media in the first place. Swings and roundabouts, both sides are at fault here; there is no particular moral imbalance in favour of the distributors.
I have all the sympathy for burning karma, but it seems to come down to this:
It is easy
There is virtually no way to get caught, only a few out of probably millions do and if you buy a VPN that number drops to virtually zero.
It is easy to justify that you are not really stealing, because one you can't practically buy the thing and two you are not taking anything from the publisher.
Of course there are also those who fundamentally don't believe in copyright being a valid agreement, at least in its current form. I count myself weakly in the last group, in that I think music and movies should be subject to a compulsory streaming license - the producers gets paid for each view, but they do not get to choose who can watch when or where.
It's the reverse. At some point people got so entitled as to believe they could control information products (like songs, stories, literature - and later, thanks to progress, pictures). Moreover, they've managed to codify those protections into law, so that the police could become their enforcement arm.
The right to participate in local culture (and thanks to the Internet, local often equals to global) is something core to society. Thinking you can prevent people from exercising that right is being entitled.
There is a freedom of speech argument to be made as well. Rights holders are one aspect but the other major cause of region locks is censorship. Many young people resent their governments telling them what they can or cannot watch. Some local content is not available because government censors have stepped in.
Do you think your government should determine what you, as an adult, should be allowed to watch? Do you think a government should be able to block certain works for religious reasons?
Sometimes I either consume something and don't pay for it because the price is too steep or access too restricted, or I don't consume something and don't pay for it.
Often, at the price and availability that is legally provided, I simply am not going to pay. At that point, the question is whether I get to consume it at all and they gain a potential fan and future customer, or I don't.
In this day and age it doesn't make sense for me to buy an indie album not available on a streaming service without already knowing that I like it. If I did that every time I wanted to listen to something, I'd be out of money. Nor am I going to drop $40+ just to watch a single season of a TV show. Once my money is out of the equation, everyone loses by me not consuming anyway.
Maybe not at scale, but to some degree. About a year ago I went from watching TV series on streaming services about 1-2 hours per day to...well almost nothing.
Initially it was because I had exhausted all the series I was interested in. But now there are many seasons worth of content that....I'm probably not going to watch any time soon. Because my habits have changed. The time I spent on watching shows is now spent doing something else. A show has to be extremely good for me to bother watching it. (Like Mr Robot. What a great show).
I've started watching a few shows again. But now it is at the rate of 1-2 episodes per week across all shows. Rather than 2-3 episodes per day. And it is a bit...boring now.
I'm not typical, but the industry has to be aware that people can change their habits. And they won't necessarily change them back.
(So what do I do instead? I spend more time making stuff and reading / listening to audio books while making. In the last year I read / listened to somewhere between 55 and 65 books. Not counting technical or scientific books)
Agree that its possible (and that Mr. Robot is great haha) I just think that the way things are moving socially with millennials who hang out together and barely look away from their phones it is more likely they will binge watch more shows rather than less. Just an opinion though.
Nah, if you torrent you show there's a market for these kinds of shows. The networks probably do track those numbers in order to decide where to license their content. By torrenting unavailable content you're showing there's a demand for this content.
Unavailable period or unavailable on netflix? I understand the moral argument for torrenting unavailable content.
But more and more I hear people say they feel justified pirating anything not on netlflix. As if netflix is supposed to buy you a pass to all content ever made.
> But more and more I hear people say they feel justified pirating anything not on netflix
As somebody from a "2nd world & irrelevant" country (Czech Republic, we are in the EU), the situation is:
* Netflix launched here with the global launch, not even Netflix' own shows are fully on Netflix, because Netflix licensed them to the local TV channels;
* Hulu is not available outside the US (it says so when I go there);
* Amazon TV, iTunes do not operate here;
* there are local "TV streaming" competitors but they usually only have Czech (i.e. bad) TV shows.
I believe this is a situation common in many of the countries where Netflix recently launched -- and that was the complaint that started this thread.
The single EU digital market [1] should go some way to solving this (if the owners want to make it available in the UK/IE then everyone else in the EU can see it too).
But I don't know how that will work with licensing to TV channels, which are still mostly national.
Improved intra-EU parcel delivery will be great, too.
(CZ is a middle sized country for the EU. Denmark, Ireland or Croatia are half the size, and there are five countries with <2M people — LT,EE,CY,LU,MT..)
We can sure hope so, but judging by the way how EC rolled over on its back to huge telcos in net neutrality directive I don't have much hope this will pass without content conglomerates breaking it in some way.
If you can't in good faith find a way to watch the content legally, sure go ahead and pirate it without feeling bad.
But my point was an 8 dollar netflix subscription isn't a "all you can eat" pass for content. Yet, people treat it like one. Like somehow content deserves to be pirated if it isn't on netflix.
These two actions are identical from a market perspective. They both reflect the consumer's decision that a given product is not worth the money being asked and the choice to stop paying.
The possibility of selling something at a later date is not something a market can, or should, guarantee you. If you're selling bread, and I open up next door and sell cheaper bread, your possibility for sale just went down significantly.
Netflix and Co are the startup of the online media, the traditional players are torrent, p2p, direct download, newsgroup, ... It is akin to Blackberry deciding to stop selling phone in your country, and you would suggest that instead of buying Android or iOS as they have done the last 7 years, user should just stop using smartphone instead ?
That is sad that the big player is the illegal activity, but think of it this way: the content has been available online for at least a decade before it was distributed legally. And yet despite coming late to the market, charging money, with the backing of actual media companies, Netflix choice is pitiful about everywhere in the world except in the US and is still in many ways inferior to the alternative ( subtitles, release date, quality ).
Netflix market is to convince people that are watching illegal movies, to pay for the insurance that they won't get sued. People that would not watch a show until it is available legally are people like me. We have waited so long that we don't even want it anymore, not legal, not illegal, not at all, the craving to see something is just gone, it has been years since I felt awkward with the movie talk at the coffee machine, so not even the social pressure it there anymore ( Just to illustrate, I have been an Amazon Prime member since the beginning, and I have watched maybe 5 movies on it )
I use a proxy service as the South Africa content library is piss poor , no use saying you are available in the country if you can only carry a small selection.
Naspers owns the satellite tv market here and they launched a streaming service months before Netflix arrived and signed up all the good stuff.
You are paying Netflix for different content. It's like renting a room at Motel6 and walking into a Hilton and sleeping there instead. Sure you paid, but you didn't pay for that Hilton room.
From a different prospective, he's willing to pay for content in his area. By refusing Netflix the rights to sell the content in his area, the rights holders are indirectly refusing to sell him the content. He offered them the money, but now it goes to someone else. By showing the money is there in his market, he does encourage the rights holders to allow Netflix to sell in his market.
I understand other entities likely hold the rights in his area than the ones allowing Netflix to sell content in the US.
Analogies only go so far, but it's more like he tried to pay for a Hilton room in Elbonia, and Hilton said "No f'ing way we allow franchises in Elbonia", so he paid for a Motel6 and then went and slept for free in an abandoned building where someone had illegally written Hilton above the door. Yes, Hilton's intellectual property rights are being violated, but he's not incurring direct costs upon Hilton, and he did give first offer to Hilton. Hilton is losing opportunity cost, but it's hard to blame the person who tried to pay them.
The problem with your analysis here is assuming that these right holders aren't licensing their content in these countries. And sometimes that is true. In those cases, it's a sort of no-harm no-foul situation. If the person can't pay, no revenue was lost.
But a lot of the time they are making it available, but Netflix just isn't the company who bought it.
It is netflix's job to go and spend teh money to get content licenses for countries where they are selling their service.
It's a bad analogy. I want both the Hilton and Motel6, am prepared to pay for it and currently pay More than the Hilton user. Stepping away from the broken analogy the concept that some provider decides what media I consume is hilarious and I'll never accept that. Take spotify as a good case, the only reason they work is that they provide me with pretty much everything I want to listen to, granted some indie folks will disagree. Meanwhile for video it's still a much more fragmented landscape and this is a step in the wrong direction.
> Some members use proxies or “unblockers” to access titles available outside their territory. To address this, we employ the same or similar measures other firms do. This technology continues to evolve and we are evolving with it. That means in coming weeks, those using proxies and unblockers will only be able to access the service in the country where they currently are. We are confident this change won’t impact members not using proxies.
When Netflix made the whole "Netflix is Available Around the World" post at first I thought they had some incredible IP agreements that allowed them to finally "go global" for relax but really they just mean that they have have some level of service in all of those countries.
> We are confident this change won’t impact members not using proxies.
Will affect Netflix's bottom line, I prefer films to series (I don't have time for 22 1hr episodes but a good film now and then was worth the subscription) but Netflix UK is shit frankly, the only reason I haven't bothered to VPN into the US is because I can't be bothered (I actually watch more tech talks on the media PC/TV than I do anything else at this point - Code Mesh videos are awesome).
If I went back 25 years or so and showed my younger self the Internet of today, what would probably surprise me the most is how stubbornly we've clinged to political borders and the extent to which we've tried to graft them onto a mostly border-less computer network. I was pretty convinced back then that the internet would help to blur the lines between States, but it appears that the opposite has happened.
Yeah, funny how I'm allowed to order a DVD from US or Germany, while at the same time I'm forbidden from paying to watch that show from a German or US streaming service just because I live a bit to the south.
The licensing deals that can be made with local broadcasters. They are making profits, just not from you. Supposedly if you wanted to watch it legally you would pay for whatever service is allowed to legally broadcast the content to you.
For reference I believe this to be stupid, but that's where this fabled profit lies.
The reason for this is the technical difference between streaming and playing a DVD. Transporting a DVD isn't copyright infringement. Streaming always requires a license because it involves making a copy.
Netflix actually built itself on the fact that you can send DVDs wherever you want.
I was just thinking about that earlier... The internet used to be so free and open and now, when people realized they could squeeze even more money out of it, it's now become this sanitized, over-controlled network instead of the "Library of Alexandria" that it used to be. :(
I understand what you're trying to say, but you are stretching this a little too much. Netflix is not an example of open internet - wikipedia is - and sure as hell is nothing like the Library of Alexandria!!!
It's a bit of a stretch ... but now that it's mentioned I bet that the library of Alexandia did have a hell of a lot of folk tales and fiction from different cultures.
I wasn't specifically mentioning Netflix as the bastion of openness. I was just commenting how something like YouTube, for example, is a lot less useful now that there's tons of money to be made from it. How many times have you read an article or gone to a link where the video is now missing because it was taken down due to some kind of weird request. Twitter was awesome until everyone decided to start using it as a promotional tool instead of a social platform. That was more what I was going after...
> I was pretty convinced back then that the internet would help to blur the lines between States, but it appears that the opposite has happened.
I'll disagree. The idea that we can use things like proxies shows how the internet has little regard for our ideologies. On top of that, people aren't going to stop just because Netflix makes it harder, they are just going to pirate instead.
So officially, yes, the internet hasn't blurred the lines. In reality, Internet-users are becoming quite disenfranchised with the entire "State" idea, and frankly just wander around it.
And this, including the long debate about piracy in a parallel thread, is an example of those worldviews in conflict.
It's happening. Myself, and a lot of other people I know, don't feel tied to the nation states at all. Where many are still thinking about themselves in terms of their countries, we consider ourselves citizens of Earth and members of human race first, and the nationality is something I'd call a cultural quirk local to our geography. We speak different languages, but we see it in the same way as different hair colors. Just funny, but ultimately irrelevant quirks.
We had that utopia for a while, but now it seems that we need to fight to preserve it. IMO, pushing regional borders onto the Internet is a step backwards for humanity.
It really does suck being in the US sometimes too. English is my first language, but I also speak German and it's really hard to keep that language fresh in my mind. I use a VPN to access German Netflix, because there are no German language shows on the US Netflix. I have a hard time trying to buy German books because Amazon US doesn't stock them and Amazon.de, even when accessed over a German VPN, won't sell them to me with a US credit card. And if I buy a German DVD, I can't play it on my US DVD player.
I thought the Internet would fix it but instead it just lets me know all of the things I should have access to but don't. It's not like I can pop over to Germany for a few hours and pick up ein Roman. And worst of all, The Pirate Bay doesn't have 99% of anything I'm looking for in German. So I literally have zero access, legally or illegally.
That's weird. When I try, it says "I think you're trying to buy from Amazon.com" and redirects me away from the German site.
edit - Yeah I just tried and I get this message:
Wir konnten Ihren Einkauf nicht abschließen. Ihr Kindle-Konto ist auf Amazon.com angemeldet. Kindle-Titel, die für Ihr Land verfügbar sind, erhalten Sie auf Amazon.com.
Basically saying "your account is linked to Amazon.com, to see titles available in your country go to Amazon.com".
I actually signed up for a brand new account on Amazon.de, and when I go to the Kindle version of a book I want, instead of a purchase button, I get this message, which I understand the translation but I'm not sure what they're trying to communicate to me.
Kindle-Titel sind für Kunden in DE unter Amazon.de verfügbar.
Setzen Sie Ihren Einkauf im Kindle-Shop von Amazon.de fort.
Clicking the "im Kindle-Shop von Amazon.de fort" link redirects me to the same page with the same message.
Kindle; so e-books right? That's digital content, and that suffers from the same problem (and silly restrictions) Netflix is having. Real — sorry — physical books might work.
You can switch your country settings from Amazon US to Amazon DE and back with no ill effects. I did it several times. You get to keep all Kindle books you bought in both countries. Just follow the link at Amazon DE where the buy button should be and instead it says "Have you moved recently? You may change your country on the Manage Your Content and Devices page."
I often switch countries via VPN multiple times a day to access certain shows or movies, and thus had access to a really large library. This fulfilled 99% of my video entertainment needs, and piracy was generally no longer required. I even changed my habits and no longer need to watch everything new ASAP, but now I can wait until it is available somewhere in the world via Netflix.
I'm not sure if that is true but I always felt that by using Netflix, even if it was somewhat fraudulent in the "wrong" country, the content owner did get their few pennies "from me" for my view.
It's interesting because Netflix is a parallel to the US TV networks in the 80s.
I remember when Fox was an up and coming network. They had (at the time) edgy content like 'Married with Children', to get more viewers..and now have corporate drivel like 'American Idol'.
Netflix is doing the same thing. They create their own content with nudity, swearing, and edgy content to get what the regular networks aren't really doing (and to get the youth interested).
When they get enough market share, it will only be a matter of time before they become the thing they tried so hard to replace: a monopoly with fading and corporate-friendly content.
I understand why they are trying to block proxies, but how can they even tell that I'm tunneling through SSH?
Why? They probably negotiated a license deal and one of the conditions of that deal was that they try harder to block the grey market. The fact that this announcement comes at basically the same time as their global expansion is a hint.
It's interesting that you posit that the ultimate endgame is "corporate-friendly content". I was curious why you think that content is heading that way?
If anything, I'd argue that globalizing Netflix combined with stronger control over their own original content enables Netflix to move towards an endgame where lots of niche audiences are served (rather than only mass markets). At CES, Ted Sarandos (VP of Content) mentioned that traditional TV had to hit home runs all the time, while Netflix can score with singles, double, etc. Why would Netflix jeopardize this advantage and hop in the time machine to become an outdated TV company?
It sucks that House of Cards and some of the older original content (particularly the more popular titles) aren't globally available, yet, but I believe (also from the CES talk), this was done because Netflix couldn't afford the financial risk at the time (and/or simply could not afford the global rights) for some of these shows. More recent/upcoming shows are licensed globally, so there's an apparent effort to ensure that Netflix moves to having a single global catalog. This obviously takes time, though, as the whole original content engine starts to ramp and new licensing deals are struck.
"It's interesting that you posit that the ultimate endgame is "corporate-friendly content". I was curious why you think that content is heading that way?"
Every company I've seen eventually goes this way. When a corporation becomes large enough, they start answering to special interest groups on the left/right and self-censoring content as to not tarnish the reputation of investors or lose valuable market share.
"If anything, I'd argue that globalizing Netflix combined with stronger control over their own original content enables Netflix to move towards an endgame where lots of niche audiences are served (rather than only mass markets). At CES, Ted Sarandos (VP of Content) mentioned that traditional TV had to hit home runs all the time, while Netflix can score with singles, double, etc. Why would Netflix jeopardize this advantage and hop in the time machine to become an outdated TV company?"
I hope you're right. So far, they are copying the cable company strategy: license older content to get the viewers and then eventually create your own content to make more money. It's a pretty good business strategy, if you can pull it off.
When the Syfy (I actually hate this name) channel first came out, it was all old episodes of Quantum leap, Star Trek, and lost in space. They slowly built their own content over the years and now pretty much only have original content.
It's also tends to happen with monopolies (if this ever happens to Netflix). Right now, they are taking tons of chances and it's hit/miss (which means some fantastic content for customers).
When you are on top, your strategy changes to what has worked. You don't want to lose market share, which means taking less chances. You aren't desperately trying to gain market share, you are now holding onto it. So, we might still see cool content, but it won't be as groundbreaking or as often.
I feel like this eventually gets watered down enough, and big money/advertisers get involved, and the cycle repeats.
I was an avid XM radio fan from the beginning. Many of the shock-jocks were allowed to say and do pretty much anything. After the big merger, it's now a shell of what it once was (the same strategy as the radio industry. If you compare the jocks of the 90s and today, it's a much different landscape).
I absolutely love the explosion of podcasts in the last couple of years. It has given people the complete freedom of speech and has pretty much replaced what I loved about satellite radio.
It reminds me why a free Internet is so important.
As far as how much control Netflix retains over its internal vision/strategy in the long run, I'm not sure if there is anyone or any group in a position dominant enough to to swing the the company in a direction counter to its internal mission (http://ir.netflix.com/long-term-view.cfm). I think dedication to staying easy, convenient, ad-free, etc. is pretty critical to keeping the user base happy (beyond just being part of their core vision), and I don't see that changing for any reason for the time being.
It's an interesting thing to watch evolve over the next few years, but I know it sucks for most of the global market with the current catalog disparity. It's hard to say which of the platform or the content are the cart and the horse, though. Do you need the platform to deliver before you ramp the content, or do you need to ramp the content before you open up the platform?
>Every company I've seen eventually goes this way. When a corporation becomes large enough, they start answering to special interest groups on the left/right and self-censoring content as to not tarnish the reputation of investors or lose valuable market share.
Most of the media you mentioned is a-driven. Netflix doesn't sell ad space, why would they need to answer to any group their than their customers?
I don't understand why they are trying to block proxies, even using your logic.
If they want to replace monopolies, then they should become they place everyone wants to use. If everyone in Country-X cut the cord and switched to Netflix, then Netflix wins, right? But by limiting content (by blocking proxies), people will have less reason to switch.
They are blocking proxies because the content owners demand it and are making better enforcement of geofencing part of their contract/license. The content owners demand it because foreign-country distribution rights are less valuable if people in foreign countries can already get the shows from US Netflix.
Business is all about relationships, especially in the case of Netflix.
Their relationships need to be beneficial to the content creators, at least until they can have a full-platform of self-created content, which I don't think will ever happen.
They have contracts with the content creators, which only allow them to show a movie/show in X part of the world or country. I would imagine if they want to show to another country, they need to pay more in licensing fees..and the profits/numbers probably don't make sense to do that.
I just asked the Smartflix team about it and here are their answer:
"Hello! Yes, we are aware about the recent statement that Netflix has published, and needless to say we are upset about it!
However this does not mean the end of Smartflix. We are constantly able to outsmart these systems, and we will continue to do so for as long as humanly possible - so fear not!"
I you do a job for me, and I don't pay you, then most people will agree that I really ought to pay you, and that you were wronged and that I am morally and legally obliged to mend my ways. You could convincingly explain that situation to a five-year old.
Now consider the perspective of someone who has the disposable income to pay for digital content, and is willing to support content producers, but gets told that his $10 is not as good as the $10 from someone from another country with a similar standard of living. This is acceptable with physical goods, where transport and stock have to be taken into account, but with digital content and today's Internet speeds it is hard to garner any sympathy.
So we are left with a choice: don't watch that show, or download it illegally and watch it. It is quite hard to convince people that by downloading the show illegally, you are now depriving a content owner in some foreign country of income by not being able to sell the local rights to that content for as good a price to a local distributor; if one can be found at all, who might sell that content to you in your country, or not, or only for a much higher price on DVD or BluRay, depending on their whim and abstract factors such as the local digital content market and the actions of competitors, and…
Good luck convincing these new pirates of their moral wrong.
I assume Netflix would happily stream everything everywhere but the content producers that license the content want strict control over who sees what when. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
> the content producers that license the content want strict control over who sees what when
That's just stupid, or there is some very sick collusion and conflict of interests going on there. Normal creators should be interested in maximizing reach, not in limiting it. The more reach they get - the higher should be their profit.
Which undermines creators' reach if that middleman imposes on them some restrictions, such as not using other distributors which ends up in this geoblocking and such. In the competitive digital market, such middlemen with exclusivity restrictions should not exist. The fact that distributors have such a sway that they can impose limitations shows that competition is poor (i.e. there aren't enough distributors or they have very uneven influence).
Content producers tend to want to distribute their products for as wide an area as possible, which means needing to negotiate exclusivity rights with the providers of certain countries. As such, netflix can't negotiate with the content providers to gain rights, because the providers already sold those rights to other parties. Good streaming services are a relatively new phenomena, and as such, it's going to take a while for content providers to renegotiate deals to provide the content for the newer definition of what the widest area of distribution is.
So, in short, blame the local distribution entities as much as the content producers for not providing streaming services for the content they have the right to broadcast at this point in time.
I would seriously HATE to be one of Netflix's content negotiators. That has to be one frustrating job trying to get content producers to realize they have been asleep for the past decade and the world has changed.
What a nonsense. They can as well try to forbid selling books in stores to foreigners. It's pointless and it's exactly the same level of stupidity idea. Let's see any store making such a policy and what kind of idiots they'll be taken for. Somehow Netflix and Co. think it's supposed to be normal in digital case?
I wonder at what point Netflix as a distributor gets powerful enough to dictate terms to media providers rather than the other way around (like "This content will be playable in any country where Netflix offers service.")
When they can offer the producing entity more money than they would get by sub-licensing, of course there is a convergence here, as Netflix eats into the existing TV market the revenue that the incumbents can pay will decline (unless they adapt) which will bring the price down of global licensing.
In effect if Netflix and the cord cutting trend continues they'll gut the existing markets ability to pay, probably an economic term for that but I don't know it.
No vendor lock-in, you own the goods and can resell it and you get some bonus content as well. And all in higher quality video and audio than any streaming service would offer. And DVB-S2 (satellite dish) offers access to thousends of cannels for free. And free video sites like Youtube and Vimeo.
What's your point? You get most DVDs in most regions, even with optional translated subtitles and dubs, right? I could go on, but DVDs are a everyday articles and even your mum can buy and play them. And read the full Wikipedia article.
If you want to watch (say) a German movie in German while in America, you need to import a DVD player set for the correct region. This is certainly possible and lots of ex-pats do it, but it's not as simple as "just buy the DVD."
The hard part is to get a DVD player that will actually play the movie. You can't walk into Best Buy in Iowa and get a European region-coded DVD player.
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] threadhttps://www.maxmind.com/en/proxy-detection-service
Still not impossible, just a bit harder when that $5 DO droplet is no longer good enough to proxy Netflix through.
I've done what you're describing here, entering a made up address is easy, it is getting payment to them without triggering fraud systems that is hard.
Many years ago US iTunes added PayPal but didn't verify that the address on the PayPal account was the same as the address on the iTunes account, so you could pay using your local billing address, but have payment go to a US iTunes fictional address. They have unfortunately closed that loophole.
I literally don't know what you're talking about with "transferring zip codes." But I was talking about your financial institution blocking the payment, not Hulu/NetFlix/whatever.
They should reject the transaction as soon as it comes in.
You can look one up here: https://www.bindb.com/bin-database.html
Or see a list here: https://web.archive.org/web/20130827121726/http://en.wikiped...
But even if that weren't true, technically it wouldn't work because people would just share their accounts with people across the border, leading to a different form of the same outcome.
The only way this would work is if you were forbidden from using your netflix account outside your home country. This would piss off a lot of travellers (like me) who consider it literally a feature that their netflix account works in other countries, and are currently using the service in a legitimate way (as we see the local content wherever we are).
It's infuriating that I can't continue watching a TV show or movie just because I happened to cross a national border. For now, I use a proxy to always have access to US content, but if Netflix starts blocking that I'm going to cancel my account.
I think this is a bit of hand-waving to placate certain rights holders. If subscribers who VPN from the U.S. to the U.S.--perhaps for privacy purposes--are affected, and they make enough noise, Netflix will likely back off to "well, at least we tried" intensity.
IP addresses do not have a fixed physical location or a fixed purpose. They are packet routing instructions, period.
Figuring out the IP addresses used by free and commercial proxies shouldn't be too hard - they just need to create some test accounts, sign up for the proxy services, then check what IP addresses their test accounts appeared to connect from. That'll block anyone who isn't technical enough to set up their own server.
If they're feeling enthusiastic enough, they could go further - for example blocking IP ranges used by big hosting providers and seedbox providers; and monitor the main forums and subreddits to learn about any new bypasses they need to clamp down on.
There are many open source proxy tools that can do the job fine, not to mention the even simpler openssh or OpenVPN.
Knock yourself out :)
Someone should build a p2p proxy system specifically for Netflix. It would be pretty hard to block, and the risk for hosts would be low if it was limited to netflix ips only.
They can't. They can identify commercial proxy providers and the IP blocks they utilize and block them. Maybe they can auto-identify subnets based on their ARIN registration text ... it's still just a wack-a-mole process.
If you own your own IP space in the US that you use for your own purposes, it will presumably work forever.
Or, put another way, if you are truly a peer on the Internet, you can continue to do the things it was meant for. If not, you're just a media consumer.
Licensing agreements are another problem, but this one looks to be specifically about catering to local law. There are probably also issues with production company contracts, entertainment union contracts, etc even if Netflix "owns" the show. Wikipedia lists four different production companies alone for "House of Cards." Then there are probably issues with at least SAG-AFTRA, WGAW, DGA, ASCAP for music/score licensing, etc. These are all stakeholders with, usually, strong contractual rights to the IP.
Well, these series should be the ones that you should NOT need to resort to proxies for, since they're Netflix owned content.
I wonder if Smart DNS proxy servers[1] will also be affected...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_DNS_proxy_server
Except Netflix offered exclusive licenses for them to some local tv networks, as far as I understand.
Because the owners of the content, for whatever reasons (yes, these reasons are utterly stupid, of course), don't want to sell it to them.
Before, I used a theoretical example of one-copy album, but thanks to Wu Tang, I can just direct you straight to them.
"Tackling geo-blocking: Geo-blocking leaves many Europeans unable to use the online services available in other EU countries, or redirects them to a local store with different prices. This is often done without any justification. Such discrimination cannot exist in a single market."
http://ec.europa.eu/priorities/digital-single-market/access/
Why wouldn't be? Your traffic to netxflix is still being proxied, and the proxy server's IP can be trivially detected and blocked.
I don't know the logic as to why Netflix published content isn't available worldwide, though. Maybe they have non-competes or something.
Netflix's early tv productions deals were similar to how regular TV purchased content. You custom order the show, but you only get "first run" rights. The production company keeps the rights to international markets and even re-run rights.
In the USA, you can buy House of Cards episodes from Comcast and Netflix doesn't get a penny for it.
This is unlike, say HBO, which owns control control of the content they create.
I'm from a country in Northern Europe and live in a country in Central Europe. I want my movies and series without dubbing, and with English subtitles. US Netflix has been a perfect solution for this.
NetFlix Germany is already better than Amazon Germany, but NetFlix USA is the best.
I wonder why it is sooo hard to provide original subtitles and original language for all movies. Is that also a licensing issue or just laziness?
As an example on Netflix Italy you can watch Lie To Me with Italian or English audio, but the subtitles are only available in Italian. If you switch to a UK proxy you get English subtitles...
The subtitles are licensed from a different company than the dubs, which are licensed from a different company than the original show.
And each of these companies has exclusive deals, sometimes even allowing only one TV channel to show one show at all.
Since there's pretty much no other source of most of the shows locally except for buying extremely expensive BluRays I guess people will just revert to torrenting.
Or, maybe not watching those shows?
Especially when torrents are readily available in HD and fiber internet connection rather widely available.
Also since most of the streaming licensing deals kinda forget about most EU countries except the 5 biggest ones, the sympathies towards the copyright holders are kinda running low. You can show a middle finger to people in a country so many times before they stop caring about your copyright licensing deals.
I don't know when everybody got so entitled that they were willing to go through whatever means necessary to get access to content otherwise unavailable to them, but it boggles my mind how comfortably everybody seems able to justify it.
I wasn't aware that the unavailability of House of Cards was tantamount to torture, and personally, I don't see it that way at all.
There are plenty of people who think that think gay people shouldn't be allowed to be married. I understand that too, and also disagree. Just because a lot of people think something doesn't make it right.
It took real people time, money and effort to make the shows that others are pirating, and to my mind at least, their efforts entitle them more to it than my "need" to watch it entitles me to pirate it.
> To the contrary, I understand it perfectly, I just don't agree with it.
I don't really understand how it can 'boggle your mind' while you still understand it. Mind-boggling implies that it's surprising to you, which it shouldn't be.
Don't get me wrong, while I do not entirely agree with your point of view, I understand it. But to describe it as mind-boggling would be both inconsistent and perhaps a bit condescending. It seems to me that it would be better to express understanding and then explain why you disagree, rather they to pretend 'being startled'.
In the same way that I understand the appeal of, say, scientology (e.g., You are a superior being, and with just a little help, we can make you far more successful, rich in pocket, body, spirit, blah blah), but it still boggles the mind that people fall for it.
I understand the appeal to self-justify taking something from another that you want more. I understand the appeal of copying something you don't own, or can't buy, which doesn't physically "take" anything away from the owner. I understand those things just fine. What I don't understand is how low the lack of respect for your fellow man has to be that they can create something, not give it to you, and that isn't a deterrent from just taking it anyway.
Even if I accept the argument that it doesn't take anything from the owner (which I don't), and that a given copy of data is nothing more than a secret a friend won't tell me, I still respect other people enough that I'm not going to dig through their things until their secrets are mine.
I could defend my point of view by saying that I would simply not download certain things if there was no easy way to do so, but clearly we disagree on this issue. But arguing that it's 'simply' lack of respect for your fellow man and 'simply' taking does not do the issue justice.
Either it is as simple as you say, and all of us who pirate are lesser creatures than yourself (which would be convenient to conclude), or it's not as simple as you say. I don't really see how there's a third option, and that's the problem I had with your comment.
As for the rest, it's very possible that despite how much thought I've put into it, I'm completely wrong.
Offtopic, but your focus on the word "simply" made me wonder if I'd said it. I hadn't, so I'm curious as to the focus on it.
To me, if someone creates (or has) something unique, and doesn't want someone else to have it, then they should not. It doesn't matter to me whether it's freely available on the pirate bay, or locked up in their sock drawer; they created it, not me, and if they want me to have it, they'll either give it to me, or make it available to me to purchase.
Anything else violates their wishes on their thing.
This is an extraordinary amount of personalized respect to give faceless companies who are literally only acting as they do in order to extract the maximum amount of money from "content" they did not create.
That is, if you and only yourself have it, it's of course immoral for me to coerce you to give it to me, or to take it from you against your will. But if you give (a copy of) that information to a third party, the third party now owns a copy, and should have the same rights about it as you have. Which includes giving that information to me, for free.
There's no other way for it to work that makes sense. Just like you don't have a right to tell something to someone and then issue a gag order, you shouldn't have such right to any other form of information.
Of course, exceptions are being made because of the economy, but then let's be clear - piracy is bad because of economic reasons, not moral ones. Morally you're privileged by being able to limit distribution of information in the first place.
> To me, if someone creates (or has) something unique, and doesn't want someone else to have it, then they should not. It doesn't matter to me whether it's freely available on the pirate bay, or locked up in their sock drawer; they created it, not me, and if they want me to have it, they'll either give it to me, or make it available to me to purchase.
That's what I would call an argument that comes across as 'simple'. Self-evident, almost. But because so many intelligent, moral people disagree, there's probably some element in there that you're oversimplifying (from the perspective of those who hold a different point of view). Not acknowledging that is what bothered me, but of course it's fair enough if you hold this view and express it as your perspective.
Anyways, I do see your point, and I do respect it. The way I see it, nobody can fault you for choosing to be more 'restrictive' or 'narrow' in your ethical framework (where 'narrow' is not meant as an insult)!
Which is why at first it worked, then it stopped thanks to the Internet, and now it's working again, because everyone's moving to SaaS model. Which, by the way, is a step backwards in progress.
However, copying no matter how perfect isn't the same kind of infringement under law or common morals.
If someone peeks at your house, then builds a perfect replica on their own land then you may be sad that you lost the uniqueness of your properly without their paying you for the privilege of copying it... But it's not "piracy", and will hardly cause a pitchfork mob to form outside your neighbors newly copied house.
This even includes stuff for which Netflix is the original distributor, like House of Cards, because they may have licensed the content exclusively to a broadcast TV station.
Blocking things geographically didn't work in socialist times before 1990 and expecting it to work now is rather naive :/
Good luck watching A Game of Thrones 5 years behind everyone else without hearing who dies.
I haven't kept up with it, but I heard allll about a particular Stark last season (details omitted on the off chance that someone else hasn't). Even from newspapers and congresspeople on that one, IIRC.
<vague spoiler warning if anyone hasn't seen it yet>
...
...
"THIS CHARACTER WAS ORIGINALLY MARKED FOR DEATH IN STAR WARS THE FORCE AWAKENS!"
Ok, sure, you didn't give me a name, but going into the movie after reading that made it pretty fucking obvious.
This works well as an aesthetic device for popular culture, where the purpose is in large part to catch the zeitgeist in the short term. I don't want to sound snobbish about this - Charles Dickens was a master of this type of thing, after all, and his present reputation as a Great Writer In English Literature would amuse and appall the snobs of his day, if they only knew. The best parts of mass popular culture endure after everyone knows he's his father, or its a sled, or little Nell dies.
That being said, I've never been good at keeping up with popular culture ;)
And if they really want to do illicit or unethical things, they still do it (and justify it) as long as they don't think they will get caught.
This is one reason looting happens during a disaster. This is why people cheat on their taxes.
Also, I think you are conflating entertainment with art. They are not the same in my opinion.
I expect and tolerate a certain level of lawbreaking from teens and pre-"settling down" young adults.
Categorically, I put piracy somewhere among underage drinking, using soft drugs, and irresponsible vehicle operation. The pettiest of petty crime. Do those boggle your mind too?
I don't expect anyone to inherently respect IP law in the portions of their life where they're broke. Unless someone close to them makes money off of copywritten material.
We're not talking about food though, we're talking about Orange is the New Black, which is far from a necessity.
Beyond that, if I thought it was just broke teens pirating, then I probably wouldn't feel the need to speak up, but it's not nearly limited to that demographic. I have six-figure-income, grown up friends who swap pirated seasons of TV shows and in-theater movies with each other on Plex.
You're much safer going 59 than 80, even if everyone else wants to go 80. You're in front of them; they see you and take appropriate action.
Speed doesn't kill, speed differentials do. You should not go drastically slower than the speed of traffic for the same reason you shouldn't go drastically faster than it.
At least on trips I've taken to the US, people there seem a lot more inclined to stay within the speed limits than they are in Europe. Take a trip on a UK motorway where there isn't heavy traffic, and you'll find at least 50% of people are going over the 70mph limit.
Yes, but you are an American who largely has legal access to the content at a reasonable price in relation to your income.
That isn't true of some guy in Mexico who makes $5k/year and is Region 4 with Australia.
Also from the international perspective, consider if shows were available in California, but not Nevada. Artificially limiting an information product due to geography is a quaint 20th century idea.
If a person take it upon themselves to eliminate the disadvantage from being poor by accessing culture illegally, which has no harmful impact to anything or anyone physically, then I don't blame them, especially if they are a child. Its not their fault that the incentive model of culture demands that poor people must be denied access in order to force rich people to pay.
You really don't.
You don't need to eat with white people if you are black.
You don't need to get married if you aren't heterosexual.
You really don't.
Love/belonging includes feeling a part of society. In today world where culture is global (especially for so called millennials) consuming that culture is part of feeling that you are part of society.
And most people are very happy (and very able) to pay for that. So why not sell/rent it to them?
Keep in mind this is perhaps one of the few cases were you aren't totally powerless.
Everything seems arbitrary when one does not know or cannot guess at the (usually more complicated) underlying reasons.
If you make something that people want, then make it hard to get legally, alternatives will be found.
Region locking spurs piracy, it doesn't hinder it.
If anything, this should push production houses to work better with rights distribution. In India, that's already happening with "Premier" channels which run seasons alongside US counterparts. For shows that appear on now Premier channels, I have not torrented a single one. I am also sure that if not for rampant torrenting, this would have never happened.
Internet is a great leveller. Take a deep breath, let it in. By the time we all have gray hair, this will be long sorted out. You can't lock down IP by country in 2016. If you built a system that loses money if it leaks internationally, it's your fault. Next, try to build a business model that has more chances of survival than chances of sand retaining in your fist.
The real problem is that people still expect a century old business model to work. If it doesn't, they lose their minds.
If a tree falls in another part of the world, and nobody saw it, nobody visited that forest for 10 years, nobody wanted to use that wood, did it really fall? Did American oak planters lose money because of it?
What artists and moviemakers could do is, sell the right to see contents before others. Assuming that DRM is cracked and leaked after some time and will inevitably fall into the "public domain", users would not buy "a song" or "a movie", but the lifestyle of watching it directly out from the factory, while others would have to wait until it's cracked.
When the season 2, 3 and 4 of Arrow aren't available in Europe, we know that Netflix isn't selling the lifestyle of being up-to-date with fashion.
They'd work on commission. They'd work on crowd-funded commission. If you want a movie made, you pay for it yourself. If you want to watch a movie that's already been made, why shouldn't that be free? The work has already been done and paid for.
The work has already been done and paid for, after all.
Digital files have none of these.
The rationalization here was that the work was already done, so why shouldn't it be free?
It's a silly rationalization and I'm pointing that out.
You'll need to add yet another caveat to your original claim to make it work.
The fact that the business landscape wouldn't tolerate this as a legitimate method is a failure of ego and imagination, not something inherent to the system.
If you have a point, you need to find a better way of making it.
Personally I disagree, I don't think the current model is so broken that it can't be fixed. Although some things about it are just plain dumb. The primary part that is almost comical in this case is the bit where content owners refuse to make the extra money that they could so easily make by selling/renting to the millions of people that want to pay them and instead spend a fortune on "public relations" and copyright trolling.
if it's not otherwise available then how is pirating not 100% harmless?
Publishers should be aware at this point that they can either start dropping barriers to content access or people will just find another way.
If I'm willing to pay you for it, why can't I have it? What reason is there to deny me the ability to access culture if I'm willing to pay?
Is it because I was (without any choice of mine) born in the wrong country?
Am I entitled for being born in the wrong country? That sounds more like snobbery from people born in the "right" country.
Even acknowledging that musicians are exempt from a lot of what I consider good arguments in that piracy is effectively a marketing cost (because piracy does help them attract new fans, who might go to shows they can't pirate, etc., etc.), it just never seemed right to me to use other people's things in ways they did not want me to.
I think you let it go. You can't capture all the value you create. It's not how living in a society works. All our culture is based on taking someone else's work and changing it, combining with other works and sprinkling a little of your own insight. You can trace every movie ever made back through other movies, then through songs, performances and literature, pretty much back to earliest recorded history. This is partly because "nothing is new under the Sun", but mostly because works of art are enjoyed within a cultural context. If you quote Shakespeare in your movie, you don't do that just because the words feel kind of nice. You're both basing off Shakespeare's work, and - by doing so - you're purposefully making the audience evaluate your movie within the context of Shakespeare's writings, which you probably expect to bring them more enjoyment. And Shakespeare did the same by taking from the writings of his predecessors, etc.
I like the response to the letter that 'hotgoldminer linked. I appreciate the reality, that artists want to earn money too. Personally, I pretty much don't pirate stuff anymore, and I'm happy to financially support authors (and middlemen, though I'm not happy about supporting those who are just rent-seeking). But I disagree on the fundamental moral principle. I think that expecting to be paid per copy of an information that's copyable pretty much for free is not a moral right. It's at best a temporary privilege, though one that people got used to before we had digital technology.
After doing all that, if they expect a group (e.g. a non-US country, or students who can't afford cable) to stop participating in the bought-and-paid-for culture that can't be avoided, that group will find a way to participate anyway.
It's not entitlement to want to be able to participate in the dominant cultural trends (made dominant by consolidation and advertising).
That sounds pretty entitled to me.
Since when does one being able to talk about yesterday's Game of Thrones episode become some kind of divine "cultural right"?
Circumventing the content creators wishes just because you can do so without getting arrested, because you are too cheap, or some other nonsense excuse is entitled.
Few things that are crucial to this:
- digital content is copyable for pretty much free by its very nature;
- we're talking about copying, not stealing
- we're talking about information, creative content, which kind of works differently than physical items
Expecting to create a piece of information, give it to some people and then still being able to retain exclusive control over that thing is what sounds entitled to me. It infringes on other peoples' right to process what reaches their senses and do whatever they like with it.
Intellectual property is an ugly hack created to make creative works compatible with market economy. The absurdity of that solution finally became visible as the marginal cost of copying the medium dropped to almost zero. Yes, we need the hack because many content creators need to get paid (and to believe they will get paid if they invest time in creating), but ultimately it's a problem with the economy. Ultimately, we should strive to fix it on the economy side, and get rid of the IP altogether.
Also, if we're comparing divine rights with each other then sorry, culture > capitalism. Humanity is better-off this way.
Game of Thrones is not "information". It is not a basic human right. "Humanity" is no better off if you can watch it now or in a weeks time.
More like I want to pay to watch today's Game of Thrones and I don't see why I'm not able to do so.
Somehow I'm having a bit of difficulty empathizing with the law here.
Pardon the repetition, as I already stated this elsewhere, but if you had a really juicy secret that you wouldn't give to me, I wouldn't take that either, even knowing full well that if I take your secret, you still have the secret. I respect the rights of others to do whatever they wish with their things, whether those things are property, digital goods, or secrets. If they want me to have it, they'll make it available to me. Until they do, then I have no entitlement.
Incidentally, in many countries of the world - it's not illegal to bypass geoblocking.
Wouldn't buying DVDs and the appropriate DVD player from a different region and importing them also qualify as evading geoblocking? Is that illegal in some countries?
First of all, I think that this level of control over released information is something a person should not be entitled to. Not in principle, on the fundamental-rights level. If you created something and gave it away, you should lose control over it, period. This is the only way society can develop itself - it's how new art is created ("every artist copies"), it's how science is being made ("standing on the shoulders of giants").
Secondly, let me explore your example of telling a secret. If you tell a secret to someone, and then someone goes behind your back and tells the secret to me, then your gripe is not with me - it's with the person you told the secret to. Similarly with piracy, I'm not downloading the content from your servers. Someone else is offering it to me. It's not my duty to ask where did he get that information from. Please, if you must, go after that someone else.
Now I understand the need to control some of this behavior in order to make it easier for people to pay for their food by creating information. But let's be clear about it - as a society, we're doing it as a favor to the creator. He's not entitled to copy rights, it's a gift that's meant to encourage people to spend their time creating instead of earning money in another way. It's a side effect of scarcity economy. In a world where one doesn't have to pay for basic living expenses, there's little to no reason to have such control on information copying. If you created it and gave it away, it's no longer yours.
Now so that we've established (just assume it even if you disagree) that the whole IP thing is just a side effect of our economy, it follows that:
- one should not be trying to make a moral issue out of it, beyond making sure the content creator isn't completely screwed - but that's because of basic human decency
- like with all other negative side effects of economy, we need to fix it
Which means, it's the IP, not piracy, needs to go away.
People perform any number of mental gymnastics in order to justify their own interests. I'm reading A Struggle for Power right now and the 10 years before the American Revolution was basically one long exercise in mental gymnastics by both sides.
We act on our interests and justify them post facto.
Hollywood along with every other major content producer has a marketing reach which is global. If people in these countries did not want to see the new Star Wars or listen to the latest American pop star it means that the marketing sucks! So what you are imaging is a world where the content producers are basically telling their potential audience to go F themselves.
There are underlying moral issues to this story. The first is censorship and blocking access to certain groups of IP blocks. Clearly this is getting written in to content licensing contracts and that's too bad. If an IP address is not doing something hostile it should not be blocked. The second involves asking extremely poor people for more money. Someone that makes $190 a month just isn't going to be paying the US market rate to consume content nor should they - and that absolutely is different than getting a below market or price subsidized physical product or item.
Hollywood along with every other major content producer has a marketing reach which is global. If people in these countries did not want to see the new Star Wars or listen to the latest American pop star it means that the marketing sucks! So what you are imaging is a world where the content producers are basically telling their potential audience to go F themselves.
There are underlying moral issues to this story. The first is censorship and blocking access to certain groups of IP blocks. Clearly this is getting written in to content licensing contracts and that's too bad. If an IP address is not doing something hostile it should not be blocked. The second involves asking extremely poor people for more money. Someone that makes $190 a month just isn't going to be paying the US market rate to consume content nor should they - and that absolutely is different than getting a below market or price subsidized physical product or item.
But you should consider that my experience is most people view the idea that some for-profit entity owns culture or can tell them that it's immoral to share media with each other to be laughable.
Like if HN decided that any criticism of products posted here was unacceptable and someone called those who still posted constructive criticism "entitled".
I'm not saying it's that simple, but understanding the viewpoint will help you understand what's going on.
I'm trying to think of a time when people were not happy to consume whatever content was available to them. The history of media technology has been the history of people duplicating works other people wished they wouldn't. Historically many famous authors had their copyrights ignored an unauthorized works distributed.
> go through whatever means necessary
That's a melodramatic way of describing "google it, click the first likely result, click a button, wait a few minutes".
> it boggles my mind how comfortably everybody seems able to justify it
In this case we're talking about people not being allowed to purchase content. This isn't a dirty hippy waving an "information wants to be free" sign, it's a frustrated professional being told their money is no good if they want to watch the new Game of Thrones season everyone is talking about. I'm not saying they're right, but it's not hard to see how they're able to internally justify it.
I'm currently in a small non-US country, and I have a US netflix subscription that goes through a proxy, which my girlfriend, in particular, adores. If Netflix forces us onto the very mediocre local version, my girlfriend will be upset. And she's going to torrent the shows she wanted to watch so she can follow the developments and talk about them with her friends in the states. Does that boggle your mind? Is the a terrible entitled person? Maybe. But I think it's pretty universal.
Why is it entitled to work around discriminatory behaviour based on country of origin?
If I went to your physical store and you said "Sorry, no Mexicans, we only sell to American residents" I wouldn't have any issue getting the products through another channel.
In fact hopefully my actions will help ruin any attempt at making a profit by engaging in such scummy discrimination and so I actually have a moral imperative to get the products through another channel.
Let's just throw the legalistic argument out in advance. It holds as much weight in people's minds as the speed limit does.
Availability is part of it yes.
Another part of it is respect, and the media industry has a systemic problem with showing any to its paying customers. Those in charge have yet to realize that all the DRM, all these systems serve to inconvenience people who want to give them money in the first place - and I think the idea that people can be chided into giving due deference to the whims of huge corporations when said corporations won't even do something as simple as sell usable product, is just a bit backwards.
Yet another part of it is practicality, and XKCD says it better than I can: https://xkcd.com/488/
People been smuggling English bands on vinyl into the USSR and making their own copies "on the bones" last time when vinyl was big (and so was the USSR). So I suggest that maybe 50 years ago?
Is that discrimination the worst thing in the world in the context of entertainment media? No. But then again, neither is the resultant piracy of the media in the first place. Swings and roundabouts, both sides are at fault here; there is no particular moral imbalance in favour of the distributors.
It is easy
There is virtually no way to get caught, only a few out of probably millions do and if you buy a VPN that number drops to virtually zero.
It is easy to justify that you are not really stealing, because one you can't practically buy the thing and two you are not taking anything from the publisher.
Of course there are also those who fundamentally don't believe in copyright being a valid agreement, at least in its current form. I count myself weakly in the last group, in that I think music and movies should be subject to a compulsory streaming license - the producers gets paid for each view, but they do not get to choose who can watch when or where.
The right to participate in local culture (and thanks to the Internet, local often equals to global) is something core to society. Thinking you can prevent people from exercising that right is being entitled.
Do you think your government should determine what you, as an adult, should be allowed to watch? Do you think a government should be able to block certain works for religious reasons?
Often, at the price and availability that is legally provided, I simply am not going to pay. At that point, the question is whether I get to consume it at all and they gain a potential fan and future customer, or I don't.
In this day and age it doesn't make sense for me to buy an indie album not available on a streaming service without already knowing that I like it. If I did that every time I wanted to listen to something, I'd be out of money. Nor am I going to drop $40+ just to watch a single season of a TV show. Once my money is out of the equation, everyone loses by me not consuming anyway.
Initially it was because I had exhausted all the series I was interested in. But now there are many seasons worth of content that....I'm probably not going to watch any time soon. Because my habits have changed. The time I spent on watching shows is now spent doing something else. A show has to be extremely good for me to bother watching it. (Like Mr Robot. What a great show).
I've started watching a few shows again. But now it is at the rate of 1-2 episodes per week across all shows. Rather than 2-3 episodes per day. And it is a bit...boring now.
I'm not typical, but the industry has to be aware that people can change their habits. And they won't necessarily change them back.
(So what do I do instead? I spend more time making stuff and reading / listening to audio books while making. In the last year I read / listened to somewhere between 55 and 65 books. Not counting technical or scientific books)
But more and more I hear people say they feel justified pirating anything not on netlflix. As if netflix is supposed to buy you a pass to all content ever made.
Blu-rays are expensive, less portable, and require specialized hardware.
Neflix is cheap because it's got a limited catalog and the catalog is mostly old content.
Do other countries really not have a local version of amazon instant or itunes?
As somebody from a "2nd world & irrelevant" country (Czech Republic, we are in the EU), the situation is:
* Netflix launched here with the global launch, not even Netflix' own shows are fully on Netflix, because Netflix licensed them to the local TV channels;
* Hulu is not available outside the US (it says so when I go there);
* Amazon TV, iTunes do not operate here;
* there are local "TV streaming" competitors but they usually only have Czech (i.e. bad) TV shows.
I believe this is a situation common in many of the countries where Netflix recently launched -- and that was the complaint that started this thread.
But I don't know how that will work with licensing to TV channels, which are still mostly national.
Improved intra-EU parcel delivery will be great, too.
[1] http://ec.europa.eu/priorities/digital-single-market/access/
(CZ is a middle sized country for the EU. Denmark, Ireland or Croatia are half the size, and there are five countries with <2M people — LT,EE,CY,LU,MT..)
But my point was an 8 dollar netflix subscription isn't a "all you can eat" pass for content. Yet, people treat it like one. Like somehow content deserves to be pirated if it isn't on netflix.
If I don't watch it, they don't get my money and I don't get any enjoyment out of the product.
If I pirate it, they don't get my money but I do get the enjoyment. Also they get possible word-of-mouth advertising.
I fail to see any objective or moral reason as to why I shouldn't pirate in this case.
> Or, maybe not watching those shows?
These two actions are identical from a market perspective. They both reflect the consumer's decision that a given product is not worth the money being asked and the choice to stop paying.
That is sad that the big player is the illegal activity, but think of it this way: the content has been available online for at least a decade before it was distributed legally. And yet despite coming late to the market, charging money, with the backing of actual media companies, Netflix choice is pitiful about everywhere in the world except in the US and is still in many ways inferior to the alternative ( subtitles, release date, quality ).
Netflix market is to convince people that are watching illegal movies, to pay for the insurance that they won't get sued. People that would not watch a show until it is available legally are people like me. We have waited so long that we don't even want it anymore, not legal, not illegal, not at all, the craving to see something is just gone, it has been years since I felt awkward with the movie talk at the coffee machine, so not even the social pressure it there anymore ( Just to illustrate, I have been an Amazon Prime member since the beginning, and I have watched maybe 5 movies on it )
And here: https://github.com/PopcornTime-CE
I use a proxy service as the South Africa content library is piss poor , no use saying you are available in the country if you can only carry a small selection.
Naspers owns the satellite tv market here and they launched a streaming service months before Netflix arrived and signed up all the good stuff.
I understand other entities likely hold the rights in his area than the ones allowing Netflix to sell content in the US.
Analogies only go so far, but it's more like he tried to pay for a Hilton room in Elbonia, and Hilton said "No f'ing way we allow franchises in Elbonia", so he paid for a Motel6 and then went and slept for free in an abandoned building where someone had illegally written Hilton above the door. Yes, Hilton's intellectual property rights are being violated, but he's not incurring direct costs upon Hilton, and he did give first offer to Hilton. Hilton is losing opportunity cost, but it's hard to blame the person who tried to pay them.
But a lot of the time they are making it available, but Netflix just isn't the company who bought it.
It is netflix's job to go and spend teh money to get content licenses for countries where they are selling their service.
That being said, Motel6 gave him the key to the Hilton, he just had to walk over and use it
> Some members use proxies or “unblockers” to access titles available outside their territory. To address this, we employ the same or similar measures other firms do. This technology continues to evolve and we are evolving with it. That means in coming weeks, those using proxies and unblockers will only be able to access the service in the country where they currently are. We are confident this change won’t impact members not using proxies.
Will affect Netflix's bottom line, I prefer films to series (I don't have time for 22 1hr episodes but a good film now and then was worth the subscription) but Netflix UK is shit frankly, the only reason I haven't bothered to VPN into the US is because I can't be bothered (I actually watch more tech talks on the media PC/TV than I do anything else at this point - Code Mesh videos are awesome).
For reference I believe this to be stupid, but that's where this fabled profit lies.
Netflix actually built itself on the fact that you can send DVDs wherever you want.
This does not apply in Germany.
Copies that exist purely in cache, or, copies, that stop working after some time, are always legal, and you need no license for that.
It’s why streaming music from a chinese website is legal.
I'll disagree. The idea that we can use things like proxies shows how the internet has little regard for our ideologies. On top of that, people aren't going to stop just because Netflix makes it harder, they are just going to pirate instead.
So officially, yes, the internet hasn't blurred the lines. In reality, Internet-users are becoming quite disenfranchised with the entire "State" idea, and frankly just wander around it.
It's happening. Myself, and a lot of other people I know, don't feel tied to the nation states at all. Where many are still thinking about themselves in terms of their countries, we consider ourselves citizens of Earth and members of human race first, and the nationality is something I'd call a cultural quirk local to our geography. We speak different languages, but we see it in the same way as different hair colors. Just funny, but ultimately irrelevant quirks.
We had that utopia for a while, but now it seems that we need to fight to preserve it. IMO, pushing regional borders onto the Internet is a step backwards for humanity.
I thought the Internet would fix it but instead it just lets me know all of the things I should have access to but don't. It's not like I can pop over to Germany for a few hours and pick up ein Roman. And worst of all, The Pirate Bay doesn't have 99% of anything I'm looking for in German. So I literally have zero access, legally or illegally.
edit - Yeah I just tried and I get this message:
Wir konnten Ihren Einkauf nicht abschließen. Ihr Kindle-Konto ist auf Amazon.com angemeldet. Kindle-Titel, die für Ihr Land verfügbar sind, erhalten Sie auf Amazon.com.
Basically saying "your account is linked to Amazon.com, to see titles available in your country go to Amazon.com".
I actually signed up for a brand new account on Amazon.de, and when I go to the Kindle version of a book I want, instead of a purchase button, I get this message, which I understand the translation but I'm not sure what they're trying to communicate to me.
Kindle-Titel sind für Kunden in DE unter Amazon.de verfügbar. Setzen Sie Ihren Einkauf im Kindle-Shop von Amazon.de fort.
Clicking the "im Kindle-Shop von Amazon.de fort" link redirects me to the same page with the same message.
I'm not sure if that is true but I always felt that by using Netflix, even if it was somewhat fraudulent in the "wrong" country, the content owner did get their few pennies "from me" for my view.
I don't know because I don't use Netflix. Would any of you who currently pay for Netflix, pay a little more to be able to access it through a proxy?
I remember when Fox was an up and coming network. They had (at the time) edgy content like 'Married with Children', to get more viewers..and now have corporate drivel like 'American Idol'.
Netflix is doing the same thing. They create their own content with nudity, swearing, and edgy content to get what the regular networks aren't really doing (and to get the youth interested).
When they get enough market share, it will only be a matter of time before they become the thing they tried so hard to replace: a monopoly with fading and corporate-friendly content.
I understand why they are trying to block proxies, but how can they even tell that I'm tunneling through SSH?
You'd only take the practical steps to filter people if you really wanted to filter people. I have absolutely no idea why they would want to do that.
If anything, I'd argue that globalizing Netflix combined with stronger control over their own original content enables Netflix to move towards an endgame where lots of niche audiences are served (rather than only mass markets). At CES, Ted Sarandos (VP of Content) mentioned that traditional TV had to hit home runs all the time, while Netflix can score with singles, double, etc. Why would Netflix jeopardize this advantage and hop in the time machine to become an outdated TV company?
It sucks that House of Cards and some of the older original content (particularly the more popular titles) aren't globally available, yet, but I believe (also from the CES talk), this was done because Netflix couldn't afford the financial risk at the time (and/or simply could not afford the global rights) for some of these shows. More recent/upcoming shows are licensed globally, so there's an apparent effort to ensure that Netflix moves to having a single global catalog. This obviously takes time, though, as the whole original content engine starts to ramp and new licensing deals are struck.
Every company I've seen eventually goes this way. When a corporation becomes large enough, they start answering to special interest groups on the left/right and self-censoring content as to not tarnish the reputation of investors or lose valuable market share.
"If anything, I'd argue that globalizing Netflix combined with stronger control over their own original content enables Netflix to move towards an endgame where lots of niche audiences are served (rather than only mass markets). At CES, Ted Sarandos (VP of Content) mentioned that traditional TV had to hit home runs all the time, while Netflix can score with singles, double, etc. Why would Netflix jeopardize this advantage and hop in the time machine to become an outdated TV company?"
I hope you're right. So far, they are copying the cable company strategy: license older content to get the viewers and then eventually create your own content to make more money. It's a pretty good business strategy, if you can pull it off.
When the Syfy (I actually hate this name) channel first came out, it was all old episodes of Quantum leap, Star Trek, and lost in space. They slowly built their own content over the years and now pretty much only have original content.
It's also tends to happen with monopolies (if this ever happens to Netflix). Right now, they are taking tons of chances and it's hit/miss (which means some fantastic content for customers).
When you are on top, your strategy changes to what has worked. You don't want to lose market share, which means taking less chances. You aren't desperately trying to gain market share, you are now holding onto it. So, we might still see cool content, but it won't be as groundbreaking or as often.
I feel like this eventually gets watered down enough, and big money/advertisers get involved, and the cycle repeats.
I was an avid XM radio fan from the beginning. Many of the shock-jocks were allowed to say and do pretty much anything. After the big merger, it's now a shell of what it once was (the same strategy as the radio industry. If you compare the jocks of the 90s and today, it's a much different landscape).
I absolutely love the explosion of podcasts in the last couple of years. It has given people the complete freedom of speech and has pretty much replaced what I loved about satellite radio.
It reminds me why a free Internet is so important.
It's an interesting thing to watch evolve over the next few years, but I know it sucks for most of the global market with the current catalog disparity. It's hard to say which of the platform or the content are the cart and the horse, though. Do you need the platform to deliver before you ramp the content, or do you need to ramp the content before you open up the platform?
Most of the media you mentioned is a-driven. Netflix doesn't sell ad space, why would they need to answer to any group their than their customers?
If they want to replace monopolies, then they should become they place everyone wants to use. If everyone in Country-X cut the cord and switched to Netflix, then Netflix wins, right? But by limiting content (by blocking proxies), people will have less reason to switch.
Their relationships need to be beneficial to the content creators, at least until they can have a full-platform of self-created content, which I don't think will ever happen.
They have contracts with the content creators, which only allow them to show a movie/show in X part of the world or country. I would imagine if they want to show to another country, they need to pay more in licensing fees..and the profits/numbers probably don't make sense to do that.
However this does not mean the end of Smartflix. We are constantly able to outsmart these systems, and we will continue to do so for as long as humanly possible - so fear not!"
Now consider the perspective of someone who has the disposable income to pay for digital content, and is willing to support content producers, but gets told that his $10 is not as good as the $10 from someone from another country with a similar standard of living. This is acceptable with physical goods, where transport and stock have to be taken into account, but with digital content and today's Internet speeds it is hard to garner any sympathy.
So we are left with a choice: don't watch that show, or download it illegally and watch it. It is quite hard to convince people that by downloading the show illegally, you are now depriving a content owner in some foreign country of income by not being able to sell the local rights to that content for as good a price to a local distributor; if one can be found at all, who might sell that content to you in your country, or not, or only for a much higher price on DVD or BluRay, depending on their whim and abstract factors such as the local digital content market and the actions of competitors, and…
Good luck convincing these new pirates of their moral wrong.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10902539 and marked it off-topic.
That's just stupid, or there is some very sick collusion and conflict of interests going on there. Normal creators should be interested in maximizing reach, not in limiting it. The more reach they get - the higher should be their profit.
So, in short, blame the local distribution entities as much as the content producers for not providing streaming services for the content they have the right to broadcast at this point in time.
In effect if Netflix and the cord cutting trend continues they'll gut the existing markets ability to pay, probably an economic term for that but I don't know it.
I am not sure there is a single 'Good' region. I find myself switching between AU, US, UK and DE.
Even the Australian movie 'Mary and Max' is not available on the Australian Netflix but is on the US Netflix. What a joke.
Countless old US TV shows like Malcolm in the Middle... not available on Australian Netflix. Where can I watch this in Australia? Nowhere? Great.
Netflix subscription... CANCELLED. (as soon as proxy is blocked).
No vendor lock-in, you own the goods and can resell it and you get some bonus content as well. And all in higher quality video and audio than any streaming service would offer. And DVB-S2 (satellite dish) offers access to thousends of cannels for free. And free video sites like Youtube and Vimeo.