New Zealand ISPs Back Down On Anti-Geoblocking Support

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.

Comments

We, the one who pay our hard earned cash ...

[Taco Cowboy]

... always got short changed

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

Get half a dozen boxes all over the world

[behrooz0az]

I've been doing it for 8+ years now, takes some time to set up all the applications(transmission, youtube-dl, proxychains, rsync, ...), but it's very well worth the time.
One in Germany, one in UK, one in LA, one in SEA. You can have access to every damn file on the Internet.

Re:Get half a dozen boxes all over the world

[black3d]

There is absolutely no content that is region-locked to New Zealand that is worth watching, that isn't already available elsewhere.

Too many negations

[tentative]

It wouldn't be untrue to say that this wasn't unexpected.

Free Trade...

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Future parent company already calling the shots?

[NimbleSquirrel]

What the article doesn't state is that CallPlus is in the midst of being acquired by Australian company M2, and there has been speculation that M2 is behind the sudden settlement. Up until now, CallPlus were quite proudly sticking up for Global Mode.

It is a shame that this is not being tested in court. I do believe that the Section 226(b) of the New Zealand Copyright Act would have applied here:
"for the avoidance of doubt, [a Technological Protection Measure] does not include a process, treatment, mechanism, device, or system to the extent that, in the normal course of operation, it only controls any access to a work for non-infringing purposes (for example, it does not include a process, treatment, mechanism, device, or system to the extent that it controls geographic market segmentation by preventing the playback in New Zealand of a non-infringing copy of a work)"
It is the one reason that region free DVD and BluRay players are legal here. New Zealanders were using Global Mode to view legitimate content that they paid for; content that was otherwise unavailable to them due to geographic market separations.

The ones to lose out here are the various studios that are content producers. At least with Global Mode, people were still paying for the content. Now, with the demise of Global Mode, and the hassle of having to sort out a separate VPN provider, the number of people turning back to torrenting is just going to explode. Of course this is all because the local Media Distributors want their cut, as if the millions they already get weren't enough. These are the same Media Distributors who delay releases by months or even years to try to capitalize on popularity while paying the lowest possible price for broadcast rights (the reason many NZers flocked to Global Mode in the first place).

Given their talk in about this being so illegal, the fact that NZ Media Distributors are not proceeding with testing this in court means they have probably realised that a conclusive victory in their favour is simply not possible. Of course this does not stop them from trumpeting this as a win for them, which it really isn't.

Nobody has a right to a market

[91degrees]

Companies contend there's little incentive to buy content from other providers if their customers already have access to it online.

So don't then. The customers don't need it. They can access it online.

We don't outlaw bread making machines in order to keep bakers in business either.

Re:Nobody has a right to a market

[Bert64]

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.

Pity we don't have a court judgement to point to

[ukoda]

It is a pity this didn't reach court and had a judgement made. I think NZ law is pretty clear and the media companies would have lost. That would have been good as it would have put them on notice to shut up and rethink their business model in view of global communications. As it is they will take this as a victory and will now act as if it was actually illegal to bypass geo-locks, using this result to hassle the next company to offer such a service.

If I travel to the USA, buy a legal DVD, fly back to NZ and watch it here it is all legal. So how is that different from having my Internet connect travel to the USA, purchasing a media file and bringing it back to NZ to watch. Both cost time and money but offer more choice. Morally and/or legally is there any difference?