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New Zealand ISPs Back Down On Anti-Geoblocking Support

Posted by samzenpus on from the go-ahead-and-watch dept.

angry tapir writes: A number of New Zealand Internet service providers will no longer offer their customers support for circumventing regional restrictions on accessing online video content. Major New Zealand media companies SKY, TVNZ, Lightbox and MediaWorks filed a lawsuit in April, arguing that skirting geoblocks violates the distribution rights of its media clients for the New Zealand market. The parties have reached an out-of-court settlement.

3 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. We, the one who pay our hard earned cash ... by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... always got short changed

    Country by country, region by region, media by media, they will find ways to fleece us

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  2. Free Trade... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So why does "Free Trade" not apply to tax payers / voters ?

    I can buy Books, DVDs, CDs, in fact any physical item and ship it to New Zealand. Why can I not do the same with Digital Media (which is what DVDs etc are anyway).

  3. Re:Nobody has a right to a market by Bert64 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There is no such thing as "a certain audience"..
    If you operate a movie theatre, you can't check passports on the door and only allow citizens of a specific country to enter.
    You can't stop someone sending physical media across borders, although the north koreans keep trying.

    Refusing to sell content to someone based on their location or nationality should be illegal as it's discrimination. Similarly, trying to carve the world up into arbitrary areas so you can enforce exclusive distributors in each area is anti-competitive and should also be illegal.

    If you want to charge someone to view your content, then you should do so in a non discriminatory way - ie anyone can view it and for the same price (external factors like taxes, shipping costs notwithstanding). Anything else should be illegal.

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