In New Zealand, a Legal Battle Looms Over Streaming TV

SpacemanukBEJY.53u writes After a threat from a law firm, two New Zealand ISPs have withdrawn services that let their customers navigate to content sites outside the country that world normally be geo-blocked. Using VPNs or other services to access content restricted by region isn't specifically outlawed in either New Zealand or in neighboring Australia, but it appears the entertainment industry is prepared to go to court to try and argue that such services can violate copyright law. Intellectual property experts said the situation in New Zealand, if it goes to court, could result in the first test case over the legality of skirting regional restrictions.

Comments

Game of Thrones

[MightyMartian]

I hope all entertainment giants do this, because when people start discovering they can't get at the latest episodes of their favorite series, the sooner the political pressure will mount on governments to modify these archaic copyright laws.

Why in the name of fuck would any fucking company want to fuck over its customers? What a sick and malignant industry the media giants have become.

Re:Game of Thrones

[Dutch Gun]

Geographical restrictions on digital content is an anachronistic holdover from from physical markets as applied to digital markets - from back in the days you couldn't just grab any sort of media from anywhere at any time off the internet. It's amazing how ridiculously non-adaptable the media companies have proven themselves to be. If you try to restrict a region, they'll just pirate the stuff anyhow, or (naturally) use a VPN to bypass country restrictions.

These companies need to realize that there's really only ONE digital market. If they just made it convenient and affordable for customers to get their product instead of trying to control and coerce the markets, and they'd have a lot more success in the long run. They should be using the internet's strengths to reach more customers more easily, not fighting against it. Idiots.

Re:Game of Thrones

[CaptainDork]

Good question.

It's because the entertainment industry is in a panic. Everything's digital now, and that presents a major problem.

Look at the population of tech-savvy people in that industry as compared to tech-savvy people not in that population.

Computer literacy has grown exponentially, just as the Internet has, and the skill level to circumvent copyright laws and protections is minimal, especially when those of greater skills can inform the unwashed.

The entertainment industry has long charged too much for its goods. That kind of obvious when you look at net income of these folks.

They are going to have to bite the bullet and open the markets to legitimate commerce or give their stuff away by not dealing with reality.

So what is the answer?

[Last_Available_Usern]

Ban non-business VPN services? Block traffic from these services to residential users? Or better yet, allow VPN traffic to be inspected? There's no way around this problem that will satisfy the media conglomerates that isn't a complete violation of everyone's hind quarters.

Hey big media! Not everyone is downloading your stupid TV content illegally.

Re:So what is the answer?

[agm]

If they want to use some form of geoblocking they should not rely on IP address as that's not a sensible nor foolproof way to tell when an internet end-point is physically located.

VPNs are perfectly legal. Proxy servers are legal. Using a different DNS server is legal. These things cannot be outlawed.

If services don't want to stream content to people in NZ, why do they continue to do so? It's up to them to not do this. They complaining that they are streaming us content - then stop! It's up to them to stop doing that.

Just make geoblocking illegal

[MobyDisk]

The concept of geoblocking digital data is silly. New Zealand could solve this problem by simply making it illegal.

Re:And back in the US

[Anonymous Coward]

Given they're run by the same media companies, there's no possible way of shortening the path.