Geoblocking, Licensing, and Piracy Make For Tough Choices at Netflix (thestack.com) 106
An anonymous reader writes: If Netflix's promise to invigilate users' IP addresses and block VPNs is more than a placatory sop to the lawyers, and if the studios would rather return to fighting piracy by lobbying governments to play whack-a-mole with torrent sites, the streaming company's long-term efforts to abolish or reduce regional licensing blockades could falter this year. This article examines the possible hard choices Netflix must make in appeasing major studios without destroying the user-base that got their attention in the first place. I wonder how long VPN vendors will keep bragging that their services provide worldwide streaming availability, and whether some of them will actually do a decent job of it.
Netflix? Try the studios instead (Score:1)
Cutting off Netflix would be cutting off your nose to spite your face--we'd be back to the wild west days where everyone was a pirate by default.
Re:Netflix? Try the studios instead (Score:5, Insightful)
The Netflix model should run like iTunes. I'm multi-national in iTunes. My US account uses a US address and US credit card. My non-US account uses non-US card and address. I can play from both anywhere in the world. I can download to/from both anywhere in the world. The account is billing linked, not location linked. Netflix should move to a similar fashion, and the studios clamp down on international transactions from US addresses as a money laundering and stop worrying about where someone is, but where their money comes from. Works for iTunes (who has lots of content), and much easier than region coding things based on IP of the user.
Re: Netflix? Try the studios instead (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole region restricting scheme is just stupid and is much like the prohibition of alcohol in the US in the 20's - it feeds crime.
Add to it that it also discriminates - you can't bring movies with you that's only available in your home country if you live in another country in another region.
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You can look at it another way. Without region lock, in non-English speaking countries, those who speak English (usually a more educated/richer segment of the population) could then buy the movies more easily, making the market for the movie translated to that country's language far smaller and thus both rarer and more expensive (as translation costs have to amortized over smaller potential audience.)
By siphoning of the richest segment of the customer base, far fewer movies would be translated, which would
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The whole region restricting scheme is just stupid and is much like the prohibition of alcohol in the US in the 20's - it feeds crime.
Add to it that it also discriminates - you can't bring movies with you that's only available in your home country if you live in another country in another region.
And de-facto illegal in my country.
It's "defacto" because Australian judges are smart enough to know that they cant dictate terms to American corporations, rather they go about things the other way. It is 100% legal to import media products from other nations and this includes circumventing geoblocking. Australian judges know they cant stop companies from region locking and geoblocking... but they've made it so they're unenforceable in Australia.
However I dont expect anything more than a token effort
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at least from what I've seen, they aren't discounted greatly in poorer countries
You're missing the point completely. If I am accessing Netflix through a VPN I am subscribing as a US user and paying US rates, because the VPN lets Netflix think I am a US customer. It doesn't matter how much Netflix might cost in Burkina Faso. The whole point of this is not to try to save a buck or two on a monthly sub - people in the third world who can afford computers, high speed internet and a VPN service can also afford to pay US rates. It's about content, because what companies like Netflix do when
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Yup. Netflix gains nothing from this.
It's not about gains, it's about losses. If the studios pull their content from Netflix, Netflix will lose lots of subscribers. If Netflix stops allowing VPN tunnelling, Netflix will lose a smaller number of subscribers. If Netflix had 100% control over their content, then certainly it would be in their interests to make access as open as possible, but they don't. Rightly or wrongly, Netflix is not allowed to sell certain content in certain places, and by turning a blind eye to VPN use, they have been selli
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you have to make reasonable steps to ensure that you're not breaking the law. Wilful ignorance is not good enough.
Breaking what law?
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And the studios will lose because those who cancel will fall back to piracy.
No, Netflix did not purchase distribution rights to those locations, so the studios aren't being paid for those viewers. From the studio perspective, there is *no* difference between people watching it on Netflix via VPN and the content being pirated via torrent. If they can make it slightly less convenient to pirate via Netflix, then it's no surprise that they use their market power to do so.
Not all who were pirating via VPN are
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No, Netflix did not purchase distribution rights to those locations, so the studios aren't being paid for those viewers.
The studio sold the rights for the US and the viewer is presenting as being in the US, so the studio was paid by Netflix for that viewer.
The studio also sold the rights to someone else in Canada, which is why the Canadian user is trying to appear to be in the US, so the studio was also paid for that user.
The studio is crying because they were only paid twice for the same person.
Not all who were pirating via VPN
Paying for content and using a VPN isn't "pirating" under any definition of the word.
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The studio sold the rights for the US and the viewer is presenting as being in the US, so the studio was paid by Netflix for that viewer.
I'm quite confused. The viewer is being presented as being in the US, but presumably he's *not* in the US. Netflix pays for the right to serve the viewer in his actual area, not his purported area or his account location. My point remains - Netflix is being paid (through the subscription) to provide content for a viewer in an area, but it has *not* paid for the right to distribute that content in that area.
The studio also sold the rights to someone else in Canada, which is why the Canadian user is trying to appear to be in the US, so the studio was also paid for that user.
The Canadian user has *not* paid the Canadian rights holder for access to the content, which presum
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I'm quite confused. The viewer is being presented as being in the US, but presumably he's *not* in the US. Netflix pays for the right to serve the viewer in his actual area, not his purported area or his account location. My point remains - Netflix is being paid (through the subscription) to provide content for a viewer in an area, but it has *not* paid for the right to distribute that content in that area.
Yes, you are quite confused. Netflix is delivering the content to the US. If the person who paid for the US content in the US takes that to somewhere else, in their pocket, or through a VPN, it doesn't change the simple fact that Netflix only ever deilvered the content to the US. It's perfectly legal to buy a retail copy of a US DVD and ship it outside the country. The VPN service is a (100% legal) shipper of content. Netflix delivered it to the US, as required.
But surely you understand that even if you pay money for stolen goods it doesn't mean that you are now a legitimate owner.
And it's 100% legal to fly to the US, buy
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Ah, I see your point now. An interesting semantic point, but the precedent is pretty clear. With mail order, companies with regional contracts tried to claim that they were serving their customer locally, dropping the package into a local mail box, etc. In commercial (not criminal) disputes, the courts found that the customer's location was the defining point.
Now, the issue with the VPN is muddied in that you are essentially shipping to a forwarder, so you can't be *certain* you are breaking your contrac
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And yes, I'd say that knowingly selling digital goods that you have not paid for qualifies as stolen goods.
All the cases in law on this are against you. Though it's only been adjudicated for physical goods, and "on a computer" often gets a different result.
Netflix did pay for the content. They just were granted a limited distribution area. Physical goods sold outside the contracted area, or passed (obviously and deliberately) outside the area by 3rd parties like VPNs has always been treated as a minor contract dispute, and the few times the issue has made it to courts, the courts came down hard on the maker,
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This is another case of the maker suing the distributor for distributing as agreed, but in a way the maker doesn't like.
I strongly doubt it's "as agreed", since I'd be very surprised if it's not by customer geographic area. My guess is that Netflix is hiding behind the "we can't tell" defense, and while it's not criminal, I'd be pretty surprised that in the event that Netflix was sued for breach of contract the court would rule against them. (I do agree, however, that the courts would strongly push the parties into out-of-court arbitration.)
Something released in the US, and nowhere else, will eventually be available everywhere else. That's a fact of the global economy.
First, that's not a fact of the global economy, it's a fact based on globalization
Re: Netflix? Try the studios instead (Score:1)
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Wait , What?
I like netflix because I pay for no commercials while watching TV.
That's why I don't pay for cable or satellite or watch broadcast television.
Sounds to me like I'm supposed to cheerlead against netflix providing me that because there's region codes and regulatory stuff. I'm not going to do that. I get the fact that I can't have what europe watches because I live in the US.I also get the fact that europe might want to watch a show the US puts out.
All I can say is please don't screw up my paying f
Re: Netflix? Try the studios instead (Score:1)
I can only presume you live in one of the countries where there is a decent amount of content. Australians pay the same amount for significantly less content due to the geo restrictions.
Re: Netflix? Try the studios instead (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would you accept that you can see different content based on your location? You wouldn't accept Wikipedia or news sites to return different content shaped by your government based on your location? There is no reason that Netflix can't sell their services in other markets, you wouldn't want your business' customers to be artificially limited by the government?
Re: Netflix? Try the studios instead (Score:4, Interesting)
There is no reason that Netflix can't sell their services in other markets
Except the part where Netflix didn't want to pay for global distribution rights (and do the necessary localization such as subtitles, for every regions they sell to) from the studios?
If Netflix bought and paid for only US distribution rights, and then take subscriptions around the world and stream the movie worldwide, then the studios would have a hard time finding distributors in, say, Asia. Who are willing to invest in the effort to do the localization and when a portion of the market had already seen the movie directly from US Netflix?
Why else would the studios bother to pressure Netflix, which is basically their reseller?
If, instead, we are talking about Nike shoes, and the US distributor take direct orders from, say, Japan, then that distributor would be getting pressure from Nike pretty soon to stop. Same thing.
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Except the part where Netflix didn't want to pay for global distribution rights (and do the necessary localization such as subtitles, for every regions they sell to) from the studios?
You don't know what Netflix wants. All you know is what they're willing to pay for that's on offer.
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Except the part where Netflix didn't want to pay for global distribution rights
Didn't want to buy it, or couldn't / didn't want to feel like getting financially raped?
The problem with distribution rights is they are owned by companies which do things other than simply provide media. Take for instance the biggest local cable company in Australia, Foxtel, who's overlord is News Corp, who's founder also happens to be the Founder of 21st Century Fox.
Now do you think a company that could cause people to go out and cut the cord can get a reasonable price for distribution rights for their co
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when you compare apples to carbon steel rods, you might note a bunch of people looking strangely at you.
Comparing wikipedia to netflix is beyond stupid. So much so that people are wondering if there's actually a brain there, or just carbon and trace materials. If you need a team to see if there was arson involved just twitch.
There are a lot of IP addresses out there (Score:3)
Can't block them all.
Re:There are a lot of IP addresses out there (Score:5, Funny)
Can't block them all.
iptables -A INPUT -j DROP
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FTFY.
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Thanks for the correction; I've copy/pasted the corrected version into my shell script notebook and will totally be using that command the next time I need to entirely destroy the ability of one of my computers to communicate over a network.
But really you should post a version using nftables, since that's the future of Linux firewalling, after all. And it might also be worth mentioning that another option is to physically disconnect the Ethernet cord or wireless card from the machine in question. That req
Re:There are a lot of IP addresses out there (Score:4, Funny)
I can't think of a worse test of geographical distance than latency. There are many reasons why people even a few miles from each other night have high latency.
Why not just a divining rod?
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A few days ago I discovered my ping was lower going through a vpn in China from the US back to the US over a 4g connection than it was without a vpn on Anik F2 in the US
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This seems pretty unfair to anyone using satellite internet.
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Have you seen the latency over a mobile connection, even with 4g?
How about people in rural areas with satellite connections?
Depends on the hardware (Score:3)
Activation after a call centre makes direct voice contact and tracks the dongle to a US location in real time?
A good VPN could still shield the origins of most of its east and west coast users at the EU and oceania entry points into the USA.
The US exit ip shows up from a US based network a bit further than a network-neutral centre with interconnection services.
Or have the VPN pop up in some fly over state with low taxes, really cheap networking and power costs as part of a massive ip range sold to a walled community.
Regional blocking is just inaccurate at best (Score:2)
Re:Regional blocking is just inaccurate at best (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not actively trying to bypass their geolimits and apparently my living room, according by google is in sweden and by netflix it's ca, us. No VPN connections in use.
Fun, google is reporting I'm in Norway and "netflix is not available at your location." I'm sitting ~170km outside of Toronto, in Ontario. Geoblocking is garbage, the only thing it does is push people to piracy.
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Also, there was a time that I was sat on a train,
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This might be a dumb question, but are you sure you don't have a VPN enabled? If you're a user of one and have its use so heavy ingrained into your Internet usage then I'd imagine it's easy to forgot it's enabled (and hence the consequences of geolocation).
Quite sure. This is a common problem with reclaimed IPv4, especially IP's that were formally used for spam.
The studios may not have a choice (Score:3)
If a TV network (free to air or pay) has spent the money to buy the local rights to a TV show, the deal they signed with the studios will generally include a clause prohibiting the studio from releasing that show via other means (such as DVDs or streaming) in that country until after the TV network has finished airing it.
I dont have any specific examples but I would be willing to bet that there are shows available on Netflix USA where the rights in other countries are held by someone else. If you can watch those shows on Netflix USA from one of those other countries, the local entity that has the rights will get annoyed with the studio (and so they should given how much they would have paid for exclusive rights)
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If you can watch those shows on Netflix USA from one of those other countries, the local entity that has the rights will get annoyed with the studio (and so they should given how much they would have paid for exclusive rights)
Basically this is a bit like saying, ``We'll divide up the city. You sell your stuff in the north an west. We will sell in the south and east.'' Isn't that kind of collusion and market manipulation supposed to be illegal?
Put another way, suppose Walmart.com purchased the rights from Amazon to serve your particular state exclusively and then jacked up their prices a bit? Is that right?
Of course IP rights makes things arbitrarily more complex, but do they really have to be? I'm just not convinced that ar
Re:The studios may not have a choice (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only is this not illegal, this is how it's been done as far back as there have been TV shows and movies. But it is also done with books, music, video games and board games, computer software, and so on. It the US, the markets are as small as major cities. So a TV station in LA pays for rights to Seinfeld and another station in San Francisco pays again, perhaps not even the same price. This goes on across the US in city after city. And TBS pays for a national cable license.
And in the end you get the program sales copy bragging about how the show has been cleared in 9 of the 10 top markets and 45 of the top 50, plus countries. Add to that streaming services around the world -Netflix isn't the only such streaming company.
The bottom line is that the companies who make this stuff have an interest in getting as many separate buyers to pay as much as possible for every single piece.
It's been this way forever. It isn't going to change now because untold sums of money are vested in keeping it the way it is. Just as an example, back in the day Carsey-Warner made well over $1 billion dollars selling reruns of Roseanne to TV stations around the US. Each station paid up to millions of dollars PER episode. Likewise, reruns of the Cosby show sitcom (once THE powerhouse show, hard as that may be to believe now) also went for in excess of a billion dollars.
Now, there is no way a Netflix or anyone else can possibly top that kind of money. Why should a Carsey-Warner settle for a percentage of that money from Netflix when they can get it all? Do you know how many salespeople made huge commission off that, and how many TV stations were able to sell massive amounts of commercial time on those shows? If you want to be on Cosby, you gotta buy a whole package of ads to run around the clock, you see,
Syndication isn't that valuable any more in the US but there is still a lot of money in it outside the US.
Re: The studios may not have a choice (Score:2)
not illegal. Different countries have different st (Score:2)
Broadcasters are limited by law to only broadcast in a specific area. It's entirely legal for a TV station in Los Angeles to buy a show, and for a different TV station in Paris to get the same show. They aren't colluding to ARTIFICIALLY divide up the market, physics says the antenna broadcast from LA can't be readily received in Paris. That's the physical reality that the entertainment industry is based on. Even NBC, ABC, and other networks only operate in the US. They are American companies, in the busi
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That may well be the physical reality of terrestrial broadcast TV, but the same does not apply to Satellite which has a much larger footprint (many european sats can be picked up anywhere from ireland to turkey) and it certainly doesn't apply to internet distribution.
Technology has advanced, the world has changed, its time to drop these obsolete business models.
Physical products are an entirely different beast, as you pointed out not having facilities to produce or import a product is not the same as intent
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Companies have tried that with physical goods also - when "region locking" has not been possible manufacturers have tried all kinds of soft tricks (making sure official manuals are not available in many languages to prevent "grey imports" as they call it in one package, placing selling restrictions "suggestions" to retailers to prevent selling to exporters) and not-so soft tricks (refusing to honor warranties on products not imported via "authorized" channels per serial number etc.).
Some practices have been
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Having manuals only available in certain languages is an actual barrier rather than an artificially created one, as it actually costs extra to translate the manual.
That said, products sold in the US will have english and possibly sometimes spanish language manuals, there is no reason these products couldn't be sold in any of the english speaking countries around the world. And even in other countries, many people speak english as a second language if not their first.
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Translation cost is not the issue here, the actual cost is the printing (more pages in more languages cost more, but then again, it also costs extra to print many kinds of different manuals). Deliberately leaving out for an example English (the US is usually not the origin country for imports) is. So:
1) Make sure you leave out English where it is not a major (first) language. Do the same for user interface. This prevents imports from cheaper countries in Asia.
2) If you want to prevent selling to neighboring
you described why it makes/made sense (Score:2)
> many european sats can be picked up anywhere from ireland to turkey)
So why would the European satellite TV company want to buy exclusive rights in the United States or Japan / East Asia, where their satellites don't cover? They wouldn't, of course. The physical reality means NBC , DirectTV, or some US company would buy US rights, and the European satellite TV company would buy US rights. Internet distribution is different. How does Netflix bid against the European satellite company? It's apples
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Of course IP rights makes things arbitrarily more complex, but do they really have to be? I'm just not convinced that arbitrarily limiting competition is a good thing.
You're not talking about removing arbitrary limits to competition; you're talking about introducing arbitrary competition. There is, at source, a sole supplier for any piece of media. One studio makes a film -- single supplier. Even if there are remakes, each is a distinct entity with a single supplier. There is no competition in production -- absolutely none. Competition in delivery is possible, and there are already often multiple suppliers offering the same product in parallel, and their pricing structur
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Netflix itself has such deals. For example "House of cards" is not available in Estonia. Probably, because they have licensed it to local public tv channel ETV.
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"Lilyhammer" also lagged behind a long time in Finland (only first season was available) because YLE (the Finnish public broadcasting company) had bought distribution rights to it in Finland (I guess due to some partner deal with NRK, the Norwegian equivalent).
This just proves that Netflix is playing two different games to make sure that if in either one they do not have a winning hand, they still have the option to win in the other:
First (and traditionally) they are a distributor, and their strengt
Re: The studios may not have a choice (Score:1)
The day I see an ad on Netflix is the day I immediately go looking for something else. I understand the cost / benefit tradeoff, and right now I feel I am getting value for my money. If they try to push ads like those cable bastards did, well, we're a different generation than our parents who didn't understand technology.
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Never stopped pirating. (Score:1)
It was obvious they'd get greedy and do this. Less content for more money is the future.
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Fucking media companies (Score:2, Informative)
The TPP and TTIP set up the regulatory frameworks for the IP and media industry to shut down the torrent sites pretty much for good. They won't go after the sites themselves, they'll just keep suing little people into bankruptcy until the rest of them learn to stay away.
The US media companies have spent a lot of money and time setting up the whole TPP and TTIP deal. They weren't doing it for the fun of it. In the future, if you don't have a licence for the stuff your watching, they'll be coming for ya.
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I think the next step is to 'fix', via some aspect of those agreements, the displays that are sold to the public so that unlicensed media can't be played.
How would that work while preserving the functionality of the camcorder feature of an iPhone?
Re:Fucking media companies (Score:4, Insightful)
So 50s (Score:2)
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C'est pas si simple que ça. It's not as simple as that.
Parfois il faut adapter les materiels pour les autres partes du monde. Sometimes materials have to be adapted for other parts of the world.
Il faut aussi payer pour la publicité. Advertising also has to be payed for.
There are various costs and legal obligations associated with distributing material in different locations, and most major players prefer to sublicense to local entities with the specialist knowledge rather than risk making mista
Payment blocking, network unblockable (Score:2)
I seem to remember a slew of "entrepreneurs" from the UK being extradited to the US for running online gambling and accepting customers from the US where gambling was illegal.
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Carruthers
The case against them was that they colluded with banks to accept non-UK credit card payments, specifically US cards.
So the excuse of not knowing the customers were gambling illegally was inadmissible.
Which leaves me wondering why all the talk of Netflix playing the pointless game of I
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May I add that I'm also curious as to why the BBC hasn't made the iPlayer service restricted to British TV licence holders.
It can't be to stop viewing outside of the UK, if you are on business/vacation you should still be entitled to watch what you've paid for.
It's technically simple to do, much easier than IP address blocking.
So it leaves me thinking it's intentional by both the BBC and NetFlix.
Netflix's biggest challenge (Score:5, Insightful)
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Streaming as a whole becomes less viable.
The networks LOVE streaming because they love being able to force ads on you - unskippable ones, at that. With broadcast (OTA or cable/satellite/etc), you can stick it into your DVR and then play it back later and skip the ads.
But of course, the cable ISPs who sell TV se
Invigilate?!? (Score:2)
WTF? Ah it's Timmay...
DRM (Score:2)
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What, when Apple has dropped DRM from videos bought / streamed from iTunes?
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Typical corporatist trickery (Score:2)
Globalization is good!... Except when is bad for *our* bottom line.
Welp (Score:1)
Back to torrenting.
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My biggest beef with those websites is that they still require flash, and are not yet using html5 video, so I have some restrictions on the platform I use.
Play globally or gtfo. (Score:2)
Netflix? (Score:2)
Signed up yesterday in fact, for my chromecast. Now I wonder why anyone uses netflix. I didn't see anything that I wanted to watch. Simpsons - nope, goldrush - nope...(repeat ad nauseum).... Oh they had breaking bad. Star Wars? They have a kids animated version.
Woop de doo.
Maybe there is a hidden button where the good stuff is?
I'm considering dropping them unless I can find something worth while.
1st declension accusative singular (Score:2)
Do they have any educational content? Elementary Latin, for example?
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Do they have any educational content? Elementary Latin, for example?
I'd keep it for a while if they had that, starting spanish, starting french, starting chinese... something like that. Yes.
We looked online for what they carried. Didn't get too far. Figured well we'll just subscribe. First month is free after all. Then I sat there on the couch with my phone for a LONG time looking for something, anything that I'd want to watch. Lucky my life didn't depend on it, eh?
Well maybe I expected too much. After all, it's just $10/month.
You can not serve two masters (Netflix!) (Score:1)
This quote shows the faulty thinking.. " appeasing major studios without destroying the user-base that got their attention" Forget the studios. Altogether and focus entirely on the user base. Eventually the Majors will snap out of their "Gordon Gecko" inspired fantasies and realize that while the customer base can get along *just fine* without them, any attempt, conversely, for the Major studios to get by without their customer base leads to death.. i.e. bankrupcy.