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SpacemanukBEJY.53u writes After a threat from a law firm, two New Zealand ISPs have withdrawn services that let their customers navigate to content sites outside the country that world normally be geo-blocked.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

And back in the US

[Mr D from 63]

With ISPs now considered utilities, the path to similar restrictions is shorter and easier.

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.

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

[gstoddart]

Because, the entertainment industry has decided that it is 100% in control of who are their customers, when they are their customers, and how much they will have to pay for the privilege of being customers.

In this case, I suspect because they've decided the people in New Zealand will get it six months later, for twice the price.

The same as they don't want you to be able to buy a DVD elsewhere in the world and bring it into your own country and watch it.

Of course the media industry is malignant, but they keep bribing or bullying lawmakers to stack the deck in their favor ... so much so that the copyright of multinational corporations is more firmly entrenched in the law than the rights of citizens on some topics.

We live in a world in which the media companies have co-opted the legal system, with the help of governments who help push the agenda against the interests of their own citizens.

If the media companies had any say in the matter, buying a CD to rip the songs to MP3 to play on your portable device would be illegal.

Because they're assholes who somehow feel their business model is more important than property rights.

Re:Game of Thrones

[Mal-2]

This is all set up so they can rake over the richer countries without entirely locking themselves out of the less wealthy countries.

In a world with region locking: "Let's charge $50 in Burgerland and Poutineville, because they'll pay it. But we also want to make some money off their neighbors to the south, who won't pay $50. (Maybe they can't, maybe it's the burned DVDs for sale on the street for $2.) But now we have to stop the people we want $50 from, from importing the $10 copies. Region locking!"

In a world without region locking: "Let's charge $50 in Burgerland and Poutineville, because they'll pay it in order to have the content right now. We'll wait until the popularity goes down so that it's worth no more than $10 anywhere, and only then will we send it to places they'll only pay $10." By that time, those $2 burned DVD vendors have saturated the market so it's not even worth $10 there any longer.

However, it seems to me there is a form of "region locking" that follows the same general divisions. It's called a "language". Don't ship discs with all languages, just the one relevant to the buyer. Monolingual Americans are not going to watch Game of Thrones in Spanish just to get it cheaper.

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.

Re:Game of Thrones

[Dutch Gun]

Note that in the story people are using a VPN to bypass country restriction. If they were just torrenting the content without wishing to pay for it, they wouldn't need to worry about this.

I could easily torrent the media content I regularly watch, but I find it a lot easier to simply subscribe to a few streaming services, most of which cost less than eight or nine dollars a month. If a service is convenient and affordable, many people will use it, for practical reasons and/or the fact that they recognize that doing so supports the creators of the content they wish to see.

Obviously, there's always going to be some people that will never pay for it.

Re:Game of Thrones

[PRMan]

They are paying Netflix AND a VPN provider. They are paying extra compared to the USA.

Re:Game of Thrones

[gmack]

6 years ago I moved from Canada to Spain. Should I have bought all new DVDs and Blu Rays when I did? And should I have bought them again when I came back last year? My favorite was the Blu Ray I bought from Amazon UK that had a US region lock so it refused to play in my Blu Ray player. The best fix? Rip it and stream it off my NAS.

And don't even get me started on the social aspect. I spent 5 years having people send me links to movies and trailers only to discover they are region locked and getting the same complaint when I sent links to my friends and this is still a problem now that I have friends in 10 different countries. And if I wanted to play online scrabble against my family? Not permitted. Europeans can only play against other Europeans and not anyone in North America.

Region coding is just plain evil and people hate it for more reasons than just not wanting to pay for things

Re:Game of Thrones

[viperidaenz]

This is the local media companies getting in a tiz, spreading lies through the local media saying what they're doing is stealing content and piracy and all they want to do is protect their rights and have people pay for content.

When in actual fact, the services they want banned, referred to as Global Mode, do nothing more that get around geo-blocking. Giving New Zealanders the opportunity to pay the same price for the same content as someone in a different country. Doesn't help anyone to get content without paying for it. You just don't have to pay the local media company $60 a month just to watch a single show on HBO.

Not to mention the shows Sky TV, Media Works or TVNZ don't bother to purchase, because they think we don't want to watch them.

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:Just make geoblocking illegal

[agm]

Geoblocking is fine if they insist on doing this. It's their content, they set the rules. But they shouldn't be silly enough to assume that your IP address somehow betrays your location. It doesn't. It can't. The IP system is not designed to indicate geographical location.

The reason this "problem" exists is because a company in NZ (as an example) can by exclusive rights to a particular programme (such as GoT). They have paid rights for this exclusive licence. They get a bit pissy if people can acquire this content without using their services. Such a thing should run foul of anti-competitive laws. A better model would be for service providers (such as SkyTV) to charge for access to the individual programmes, not for entire channels. This would work much better in a streaming world than a broadcast one. Having said that, SkyTV in NZ does often have pop-up channels for particular series.

Pointless.

[monkeyxpress]

It doesn't matter whether it is illegal or not. John Key (the prime minister) changed the country's employment laws under urgency when Warner Brothers threatened to move the hobbit offshore due to a union problem. I doubt a loop hole that allowed the NZ public to circumvent the will of the studios is going to survive long. But he has a great smile so we keep voting him in.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/oct/31/warner-bros-new-zealand-hobbit-film

Sky Television NZ wants to lockout any one trying

[Anonymous Coward]

Sky Television NZ wants to lockout any one trying to by pass paying them for it and you have to rent our box + pay for basic package.

in Oz, everybody is still considered a criminal

[swschrad]

the new offense is "using the internet."

10 more years

[future assassin]

You'll see a monster change and the media companies stating to finally flop. I'm 40 and have been cable free for 3 years. My kids and their friends don't even watch tv, just youtube and other free media sites.

Stones? What are stones?

[Gription]

All you need to know about "entertainment companies" can be found on the beginning of any retail DVD or Blueray disc. It starts with a big "entertaining" warning about copyright infringement that can not stepped past. (Helps get you into an entertained mood...) The only way to skip this unwarranted interruption is to get a nice pirated copy of the movie.

Everyone who has enough technical know how to plug a disc into a player knows that pirating movies is illegal and the "entertainment" companies are pounding the message in a very unentertaining manner down the throats of what they know are paying customers. If an industry is this stupid there really isn't much hope for them.

Re:Stones? What are stones?

[Gription]

The point is the decisions about how to monetize their media are made by idiots. Instead of saying "How many ways can we offer it so we get revenue?" they instead go and try to apply across the board control in any instance possible to their own detriment.

Re:Sky Television NZ wants to lockout any one tryi

[BevanFindlay]

Yes, this is basically what it comes down to. One company, who have been fairly used to having a stranglehold on paid content in NZ, don't like that, and oh, there might be this scary thing called competition, so rather than adapt, they get out the lawyers. There is no legitimate reason for Sky to have a stranglehold,* so as far as I'm concerned, this just needs to get chucked out of court to make a clear demonstration that it is not ok to abuse your customers and complain when someone undercuts you.

* I'm not a hardcore capitalist, so I do see that there are places where legislation or government intervention are needed to protect a market in order for it to stay free and fair. Of course, one of those places is protecting against abusive monopolies...