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Comment by thetrb | Hacker News Reader

I don't necessarily think the threat is "rights-holders suing Netflix for a negligently insufficient blocking system", but instead right-holders keeping their content away from Netflix if there's no working mechanism to restrict the content to the geographic region they negotiated.

In the end the right holders sell their content multiple times, often even multiple times within a single market. Now if everybody in the world can get US Netflix content the right-holders are the ones who will have problems selling content in other markets.

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> Now if everybody in the world can get US Netflix content the right-holders are the ones who will have problems selling content in other markets.

Or... they could just sell the worldwide rights to Netflix and nobody would have to to use a proxy to begin with.

That would never happen (costs aside). The publishers would be screwing themselves in the long-term because they would slowly erode the market into a monopsony, and eventually Netflix would be able to simply dictate lower licensing costs by being the only game in town.

If licensing deals are time bound, Netflix would have to renew them periodically, thereby granting publishers the opportunity to renegotiate terms. They can't screw themselves in the long term that way, while the distributor has the freedom to deliver content to everyone. Wouldn't that work? I'm a travelling user and I'm frustrated by having to decide which shows to choose as replacements every time I cross a border :-/. Personally I feel today's world no longer has a place for territorial licensing.

Another reason it would never happen: Publishers like to charge different prices to different countries, usually based on the average income in that country. So US citizens pay more than, say, Indians.

I had hoped Netflix did the same. The Indian price is similar to US with less then 20% content.

Is Netflix willing to pay for that? They weren't even willing to pay for worldwide rights to House of Cards and Orange is the New Black--their cornerstone properties.

Ah, yes, copyright. The ultimate government entitlement program.

It's easy to see why Netflix and Amazon are taking the seemingly-unintuitive step of developing their own shows. They're privy to the greed and stupidity of the incumbent content owners in a way that few of us ever get to see. While the studios' greed and stupidity is a problem for Netflix and Amazon during contract negotiations, it also must look like an opportunity.

While true, I have also noticed that a Netflix exclusive show (I think Making a Murderer) is going to soon become unavailable to watch on Netflix in US. Now, it could be an unrelated issue there... i.e. the show was banned or some-such, but I couldn't find anything like that mentioned anywhere. That sort of makes me confused as to how it is an exclusive to Netflix in the first place.

Some Netflix shows are just not shown in the US on Networks and often they get branded Netflix – like a lot of British Shows. I imagine the rights are worked out as timed rather than for all eternity on Netflix. If Netflix "created" the content it would be on there in perpetuity.

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