Netflix crackdown on border hoppers could kill some unblocking companies
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
The Estonian netflix catalogue is on the order of 500? titles... ridiculous compared to the US catalogue. In the US you have "watch on amazon prime" buttons in imdb. In Estonia, no such luck.
Essentially, there is no legal way at all to watch the vast majority of movies here. And people wonder why piracy happens a lot around here...
You could buy them.
Essentially, if you search for movie dvds on amazon and ship them to an US address with a US credit card, then the selection is at least 10x, if not 100x larger than when I try to buy them.
Nevermind of course the time it takes to order things online and then have them ship the dvd, which I don't really want anyway, but fair enough, that's just convenience.
So, the problem is not that I'm not wiling to pay for it, the problem is that nobody will take my money, because the movie studio hasn't signed a redistributor for that movie in my region.
So use a computer to play your DVDs. Region lockout works on the honor system.
People seem to be missing the fact that importing DVDs is not necessarily legal; and turning your DVD player to region free is arguably not legal (under the various "interfering with rights protections mechanisms" laws.
To you and me "buying the DVD from some other region" is legit, while "pirate the movie" is less legit, but to the rights-holders there's not much difference. See, for example, this submission which is talking about rights holders asking Netflix to stop people buying content from a different country.
But the industry has different ideas, and they are well funded and influential. We see the results of that influence in international copyright agreements and laws like DCMA.
See for example the Japanese games that have "NO RE-SALE" printed on the back of the box. Japanese publishers pushed pretty hard to make second-hand sales of games illegal. (I don't think that succeeded). It is (or was?) illegal to rent games in Japan.
In the face of this kind of vigorous assertion of rights of IP holders it's can be difficult to stick rigidly to the law.
"Just buy the DVD" doesn't work for the reasons given; just go without is dumb for the reasons you give.
I don't think I'm arguing for the position you think I'm arguing for.
This is definitely not true. Piracy in that region builds up a support infrastructure for piracy that can be used in other regions. It builds social support for piracy, and can spread, as a cultural practice, when people from the afflicted region converse with people from other regions. All of those things can impact sales outside the region.
And there's a simple solution: Make sure that your stuff is available legally everywhere. Because if it's not, you know that it will be pirated.
I'm hoping as we move to a global market with digital distribution, these dinosaur companies will realize that there is no risk to handling world wide distribution themselves. But it means killing the distributors (who were the businesses that helped you get that content when nobody else was listening...).
Although when Netflix's original $100m buy didn't cover production costs, it is what it is?
[0] http://www.wired.com/2014/03/comcast-bites-netflix-snagging-...
I guess Netflix and other studios have managed to achieve their goal.
Do use a reputable torrent-friendly VPN service. Such as AirVPN, BolehVPN, Mullvad, etc. And check for leaks: https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/how-to-perform-a-vpn-lea...
And if you know some things about infrastructure/network engineering the "fix" they are talking about here isn't cheap (both in infrastructure and operational costs.)
That's why the prices changed -- if Big Media didn't force Netflix to start blocking nothing would've changed. Now they do, SF is basically forced to pivot their business model slightly or risk go out of business completely.
Just copy and paste your contracts, replace America with Australia and away you go. /s
Am not saying as a consumer you are wrong. But a perspective from the other side at least partially covers the why.
For smaller and poorer markets, there are plenty of content with no distribution deal in place.
So Netflix could be the only way to make any money in those markets.
Those catalogues will grow bigger. Possibly bigger than the catalogues in Big market where there is competition.
For me, as a consumer who has been using an unblocking system for more than two years, and who would like to continue to see Amazon's content, I'm rooting for the unblockers.
But I wonder whether the cat-and-mouse game between Netflix and unblocking services is almost inevitably in Netflix's favor, at least as things currently run.
Which leads me to ask if a "cloud VPN appliance" SaaS could work, technically and/or as a business: Customers would click to indicate the country where they want to have a VPN server hosted. The appliance would use Digital Ocean, or some other hosting facility with cheap machines that can be created and destroyed via an API. For a $5/month DO server, charge $15/month. Have the appliance update its software, and/or relocate to another hosting system or IP address, as Netflix detects and blocks that machine.
I have to assume that it would be harder for Netflix to block thousands of such privately used VPN machines than blocks of AWS servers being used for such services.
But yeah, it's unfortunate that because of agreements between movie studios and distribution firms in each country, individuals have to play these sorts of games.
Maybe if there were some way to break the stream up into individual media files, and then you could download one identical file from lots of different users at the same time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_TCP
but that requires the cooperation of Netflix, naturally.
I don't see how Netflix or their content producers come out ahead by driving whole national markets to torrent sites. Once you force people onto a pirate distribution channel they're not going to pay even for the titles they could obtain legally.
We'll start to see VPN companies setup auto-rotating IPv6-only networks registered to residential addresses and pseudonyms shortly (if they haven't already) with 2-3 customers per/IP.
VPN's will cater and advertise as "for Netflix" and then the "fight" will shift to copyright takedowns and proxy-lawsuits.
If Netflix continues to crack down and push harder you'll see a lot more false positives/user complaints about being blocked than we currently do.
I sincerely hope they start using their weight to push back.
> IAPS Security Services, LLC. has gone outside the normal channels and has contracted directly with residential internet service providers to make this type of service possible.
https://www.intl-alliance.com/store/cart.php?gid=15
I have no idea whether or not this is legitimate. Maybe this is another Hola scam. Or worse.
Edit: See https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/27897/vpn-service-that... for amusing discussion.
Edit2: OK, I get it. It's whois games. See http://www.hacker10.com/other-computing/review-scam-vpn-prov... Easy to detect :(
Keep in mind that the party who has licensed Netflix a production to be used in e.g. the US might not even have the rights to the same production in e.g. the UK.
Is anyone with a 'homegrown' vpn tunnel experiencing issues? I could also think of a solution involving cookies/fingerprinting that detects if someone's geolocation moves around quicker and more often than is physically possible.
I'm sure the technology is under tight wraps, and I'm also sure that other companies will be dying to license this from Netflix if they get it right, even if it's just a lengthy list of IPs (e.g. the BBC for iPlayer).
The Netflix team is known for using reproducible automation in all their efforts. They have a significant "big data" team that can use and setup automatic classification using hundreds of available data points to classify users who are violating their ToS versus those who aren't. Netflix doesn't do anything that is labor or cost intensive: they have all of this automated.
Even approaching this from a naive set of data points is cheap: It isn't particularly hard to classify IP addresses between cable modem blocks and those for VPS/VPN providers. Geolocation on a country level is relatively reliable. Also it's pretty easy to detect OpenVPN users on layers 2 and 3.:
https://medium.com/@ValdikSS/detecting-vpn-and-its-configura...
Customer has an address in country X, they're accessing from country X and Y in the same day. Probably block.
Not the answer you wanted, not the answer that seems fair, but probably the technically right answer right now, until this situation changes.
They were talking about it a year or two ago, not sure what has happened since then as different countries in the EU have different censorship so it's not that simple (e.g. games in Germany are usually less gore).
This is the only thing I can find about it, but I'm sure it was reported on here on better known sources:
http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2015/03/30/european-commission-l...
What does the Commission plan to do about geo-blocking?
Addressing unjustified geo-blocking will give more choice of products and services for consumers at lower prices. The Commission is planning to make legislative proposals in the first half of 2016 to end unjustified geo-blocking. Action could include a targeted change to the e-commerce framework, and to the framework set out by Article 20 of the Services Directive (on non-discrimination of recipients of services). As a result, traders will have only limited possibilities to deny access to online services.In parallel to legislative proposals, the Commission today launched a Competition Sector Inquiry to analyse the application of competition law in this area (press release and factsheet)
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-15-4920_en.htm
There's lots to this behind that link, and at the digital single market site (https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en) but it seems like some DSM legislation will be proposed later this year, but not all of it (since the eCommerce report isn't scheduled to be completed until 2017)
Why then does Netflix force me (American living in Netherlands for years) to use Dutch Netflix when I've paid for an American subscripton for many years? Why haven't they locked me out?
Doing what I suggested would probably cause heck, and yeah, I travel and I love going to new countries and see the Netflix they have there. It's pretty cool :)
What these DNS-based unblocking services do is to selectively point certain hostnames to their own IPs, where they run TCP tunnels to the actual service.
Or (much simpler) use actual IPs rather than hostnames. They can still dynamically change the IPs at will by updating their web code, so it's not hugely worse than using hostnames.
http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2016-January/083833...
I suspect this type of analysis plays a bigger role than most people think.
i.e A user jumping back and forth between US and Australian Netflix - faster than 'physically' possible, would act as a VPN flag.
Personally I had to change the end point of my home made VPN, but have not had any issues since. As a precaution, I have avoided region jumping. If I did, I would try and leave a realistic gap between any access.
They blocked a VPS which is used by me and only me entirely from within the US.
And then they complain about piracy. Cry me a river. Seriously.
When Netflix arrived in France I was able to access Netflix without VPN from France, with a different catalog, but retained the access to the US catalog via VPN (without doing anything else: same account, same browser, same session even).
I have seen no change since this move was announced, and therefore doubt if it's real??
Are you doubting that they're blocking users who access through a VPN? They certainly are. Maybe your VPN hasn't been blacklisted, but that's not to say it won't be in the future.
The other explanation would be that blocking doesn't apply to "US customers" but only to customers with a non-US physical address?
That also doesn't hold water when US-residing customers are blocked from using a US VPN simply to prevent their scummy ISP from throttling Netflix.
Btw. I can play some 1983 audio CDs just fine, multimedia CD-ROMs from 1990 and DVDs from 1996. Neither a hard disk nor flash-drive nor an internet service will last that long. Triva: Did you know MySpace.com used to be a online storage service (think of DropBox) during the dot-com bubble, it resurfaced as social media website years later, and years later it rebooted as social media website again (with little success) and you know both first two iterations of content are lost forever. Welcome to reality.
The first new 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray (max 100 GB) just came out on March 1th.
"Some" is not acceptable for preservation.
> Btw. I can play some 1983 audio CDs just fine, multimedia CD-ROMs from 1990 and DVDs from 1996. Neither a hard disk nor flash-drive nor an internet service will last that long.
A hard drive is much easier to back up and transfer to fresh storage than a stack of CDs.
Edit: yes, looks like Verbatim (tbh the only company I'd trust to manufacture these aside from TDK or Sony) makes M-Disc in 25, 50, and 100GB: http://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-Disc-BDXL-Jewel-98912/dp/B011...
$70 for 25x25GB archival discs is pretty reasonable. Almost 9GB per dollar. The 100GB discs are ~5.8GB per dollar, but if taking up 1/4th the space and 1/4 the disc-swapping is worth it, those could be a good option ($425 for 25x100GB)
I meant the few early 1980s audio CDs I own. All still work fine. Pressed CDs last a lot longer than burned CDs. I only ever had problems with CD I burned myself (especially a CD production series in the early 2000s).
And they will require a internet-connection to such a fleeting service as the ones you mention to authorize you to view your content.
So basically worst of both worlds. I see absolutely zero reason to invest in such garbage.
It's also very clear that Netflix didn't want this, and that it was forced to make this move. (Couldn't find the exact quote, but newspapers have reported this).
The availability is quite sad now, though. Looking at uNoGS[0] and gk2[1], you can quickly see the disparity. USA pays $7.99 to access 5649 videos. Germany pays ~$9 to access 1412. Scandinavia (little to no dubbing) pays ~$9.5 to access 2038 videos. Most countries have half the content of the US, but pay above US prices on average.
So for some time now, EU has basically been subsidizing Netflix for America and Friends. I really hope that our licensing laws will get straightened out soon, although I can't see the movie business wanting to get rid of the middle-man businesses anytime soon. It generates a huge amount of cash.
Paying customers get shafted, and the mega-corps wonder why piracy is rampant.