After Netflix crackdown on border-hopping, Canadians ready to return to piracy

One often-overlooked point is soundtracks. This is why there's no official Cold Case DVD/BD set - it would be prohibitively expensive to license all the music for distribution outside of TV.

Media Rights Capital "owns" House of Cards, Netflix distributes the show. Even then MRC's rights are probably limited because they bought the rights to the concept from the BBC who originally did House of Cards as a mini-series.

Yeah, that's probably what they're doing. It wouldn't be too hard for them to get the first 95% either - beyond ARIN/NIC registration searches etc, they could just look for IP addresses that often have a large number of subscribers behind them, especially a large number of non-us subscribers.

Technically, if you own a restaurant, you can refuse to serve anyone, they are not entitled to your food and service. But try to selectively refuse service to African Americans, or gays, or Canadians, or Swiss, or all non-Americans, and see where this road will lead you and how much time you'll get until first lawsuit.

>Its simple entitlement

>they feel entitled to watch

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

>why do you feel entitled to consume content that you didn't create, in the first place?

Because it has been published, therefore it is public. 'Publish' is literally a verb that means 'to make available to the public'. And 'public' is literally an adjective that means 'open to or shared by all people'. Of course people have a right to access public things. Why would you feel otherwise? Do you feel guilty when you go to a public park because you didn't create the land? Do you feel the urge to surrender yourself to the police because you walked on a public sidewalk that you didn't create?

Copyright grants special privileges to an author so that they can be compensated for their work, in hopes that this will encourage people to publish things. If you refuse to use your privileges, that's your choice, you decided not to get paid. The public is still entitled to keep the gift that you gave them.

Where it gets ugly is that copyright declares that copying or transmitting something (even something already public) is itself an act of publication, and only the author is allowed to determine who may republish their work for awhile. So redistributing without permission is not allowed. But it has been published and therefore the public does still have a right to access it if it is available, they just don't have the right to republish it.

Which leads to the issue here. What is the correct result if something is public, and the public has every right to access it, but can't exercise that right because it's not available? In theory, the author should take advantage of their copyright privileges to get some money from the public in exchange for access. That would be a win-win, leaving everybody happy!

In the past, that could be difficult due to printing and shipping and international trade difficulties and various other legitimate problems. But today's tech makes it relatively trivial, cheap, and convenient to sell digital files online globally. So if the author chooses not to do so, then in the eyes of the public, the author has opted out of their copyright privilege, they have forfeited. It is a public thing that should be open to free access, since the author has chosen not to accept payment for access. Of course, that's not what the law says yet, but that's already what people believe is correct, reasonable, and ethical.

Authors who attempt to suppress access to public things, or make it unreasonably difficult and expensive to do so, or bully people who try to access them, are in the wrong, and they will lose eventually. That is an unethical and immoral stance, and it is an abuse of copyright, not in keeping with its intent.

I also hate the things Bell has tried to do through the CRTC, like that whole Internet thing with smaller providers using its pipes.

I guess it's a principal thing.

EDIT: Another example... I used to always choose Famous Players for movies. I avoided Cineplex. Then Cplex gobbled up Famous and I started going to Landmark. I should be able to choose where I consume my content.

This question is the very heart of network neutrality. You don't want your cable company running a competing streaming service.

Really, you don't.

Media companies need to grow up.

The only place I know where I can reliably find copies of high-quality cinema is a private torrent tracker... and some public libraries, but I don't own a DVD unit (and don't want one).

Sure, there might be some legal way to gain semi-convenient access to the library of cinematic culture, but I don't know about it. It's kind of tragic.

Like, people seriously claim Netflix as some sort of alternative to pirate copying... and I go into the Swedish Netflix and search for "Bergman" and get one result: Casablanca.

iTunes's selection is wider, but still, I search for "Tarkovsky" and there's zilch. "Ozu", nothing. "Renoir", nah. Oh, they do have one Murnau, the newly restored Nosferatu. No Eisenstein, Dreyer, or Godard. And so on.

Of course it's all because of copyright restrictions and maybe a lack of projected profits from these art films. That's exactly the point. Pirate copying is a way for people to share this material without being restricted by such tedious limitations.

I think you've got this wrong. The people in other regions don't have "every right to copy it", they have "every right to not consume it". Don't like the rules? Don't play. It's their content, so they set the rules. That's kind of all there is to it. I absolutely agree that you can be pissed off about this and not like it though.

But nothing gives you the "right" to force your way into someone else's party just because you weren't invited, or didn't like the ticket price. If you think like that, you're as much of a dick as the people you seem to be mad at.

So unless you are using the word "unethical" in an ironic fashion when you describe what they do, you probably should not use it at all if you're then going to condone what is essentially an unethical response yourself.

Instead, what production companies try to optimize is the funding used to create the content in the first place. They sell the rights as many times as they can, in as many different markets as they can, in order to finance the production. They are then required to enforce region restrictions to live up to the foreign distribution contracts they signed.

The fact that this ultimately results in lower profits hasn't yet occurred to these idiots^H^H^H^H^H^H creative geniuses. It brings in more cash up front, which appears to be all they care about.

It's been "fixed" now though.

> Hopefully as the popularity of onli

And can't scroll to see the rest.

Netflix launched globally without taking the time to negotiate content for most countries on earth. I'm not sure you can assume that Netflix is being diligent in trying to acquire content.

Especially since even in the USA netlix appears to be pivoting into being a content creator instead of a content aggregator.

Then they need to maintain this barrier so that the deal is good for both the Producer and Distributor involved. If they don't force Netflix to do this then the deals don't look as good to the distributors.

But 'House of Cards' is a Netflix production, and this doesn't apply here. They would have done themselfs a favour by not selling the rights to this content to the highest bidder. Especially since their ads suggest access to 'House of Cards'.

If the content creator doesn't want to sell access to the content for you, then you have every right to access it through other means. They never had to cut off access to these non-US customers: they were paying good money for this service, the same money as someone in America. Why shouldn't they be allowed access? Why is their money not as good as an American's money?

Don't forget, we have a Free Trade treaty between Canada and the US. They're not practicing free trade here as the treaty states, so she has every right to work around it.

Later on in the article, it says this:

~~~~~

Because she pays for the service and has been able to skirt the rules for so long, Lorenz doesn't understand why Netflix is suddenly shutting her out.

"I don't know why I can't have international access," she says. "That doesn't make sense to me."

~~~~~

Understanding why there are content restrictions across regions makes no sense to most people.

The "right thing" and the "legal thing" are not always the same thing.

People pay taxes because they have to. When it comes to entertainment, people aren't going to waste their time jumping through hoops.

[0] http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114391-Valves-Gabe...

Hopefully the situation will change as the baby boomer generation dies off, and a younger generation that understands the idiocy of the previous era takes over. There is no way the current system would survive if 20-30 year olds were leading the industry. It's time to ditch the horse and carriage, and upgrade to electric vehicles.

Example: try finding the live action version of Nobunaga Concerto [信長協奏曲] (not the anime that's readily available.) Now I'm sure someone here can do it. But look at its seed ratio compared to say, Game of Thrones or Last Week Tonight. And this is a really easy case, because it's being streamed subtitled from Crunchyroll. Now imagine the difficulty of series not conveniently subtitled into English on major streaming services already.

And even the paid one way option ... there's also too many people on Hola sharing the same endpoints, and the threshold is high enough that many people are reporting that Hola is getting blocked as well.

The ratio needs to be 1:1. And if Netflix manages to block a user connecting from only two residential IP addresses, then the final step in this game is those two people will share their logins with each other. I connect to a Japan exit point, and use that person's Japanese account login; and vice versa. At that point, there is nothing left that Netflix can possibly do to stop me.

In my scenario, it would be two accounts with two IPs each.

That threshold is way below something truly actionable. I mean, could you imagine? A guy travels and uses hotel wi-fi, perhaps internationally. Now he has two IPs associated with his account, and so they block/ban him. Not going to happen.

Hell, locally one's IP often changes thanks to DHCP leases expiring.

> C) Scrutinize accounts who are using an IP that is swarming with accounts from other countries.

This won't scale, and that's entirely the point. They catch ExpressVPN and co because there are 500+ accounts from each of the pool of ~20 IP addresses they have. They probably just block the whole subnet mask. VPS is the same, "this is a datacenter IP range. No customer is running out of a datacenter, it must be being used as a VPN."

But a guy's home connection of 50/20 mbit/s can only handle two users, and can't be flagged as belonging to a datacenter, and can't be range-blocked. I'm sure there will be cases of a person wanting access to 10+ regions, but for the most part, people just want one extra region. In my case, Japan. In most people's cases, the US.

But in most cases you aren't. Sure you pay netflix, but netflix just keeps the money. They definitely don't go find and pay the right people.

The source code is still on Github, and new mirrors appear every once and then.

I use this subreddit to find a trusted one: https://www.reddit.com/r/PopCornTime/

https://popcorntime.sh

And since Netflix is such a big party, they have blame too.

Your comment "this awesome clip the world is laughing and talking about" refers to SNL, but there are examples of viral videos that didn't originate from a big-name US studio. "Charlie bit my finger" and "Gangnam Style" are two examples. I don't think it's too much of a stretch that English-language long-form content (30-60 minute series) can be developed without having a "Made in America" imprimatur on it. Danish crime shows are popular in Europe and the UK, while Korean dramas are extremely popular in East Asian markets. Indian cinema is also popular in the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. A small slice of British shows like Made in Chelsea have carved out a niche in English-speaking markets like the US, Canada and Australia.

I hope production studios large and small across the world are seeing this as an opportunity to expand past their borders rather than simply continue "Business as usual" under the protectionism offered with these types of restrictive licensing rules.