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Comment by ndsipa_pomu | Hacker News Reader

Also an issue is that the BBC may own rights to broadcast in the UK, but not other countries, so even if they wanted to, they would have legal issues with crossing borders.

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This could be easily mitigated by legal regulations on the national level. Even if a contract tried to enforce it, the law precedes contractual obligations.

I don't understand how that would work. If the UK passes a law stating that TV license payers are allowed to watch BBC programmes (e.g. iPlayer) in say, Belgium, then if a rights owner prosecutes the BBC for breach of contract (in Belgium) how would UK law be applicable?

Exactly, BBC would need publishing rights in all countries the viewers would wish to watch it in. Unless they changed all there existing agreements with rights holders to not be constrained by territories, which they aren't going to do, or at least only for a lot of money (and even then they might not be able to if the rights are already granted exclusively to someone else).

I don't think that's how it works. It can be distributed in UK following UK laws yet accessed from some other place. If i borrow a DVD from my local library and travel abroad with it, my library is not infringing on anything and neither am i.

That's not how it works. IP addresses were never a location information to begin with. Many people in your country have a "foreign" IP, and many people from other countries have IPs from your country: yes that's how the Internet works. IPs are technical identifiers, not ID cards. Due to this, it was already pointed out over a decade ago that public services blocking certain IP ranges led to terrible inequalities: for example there is (or at least used to be not long ago) many public services French citizens residing in the French colonies (DOM/TOM) could not access despite paying taxes and officially residing on French territory. The same is true with some ISPs (eg. mobile operators) who use "foreign" IP ranges with dynamic IPs: you can be physically in metropolitan France yet be denied access to certain services.

As the VPN market has shown, filtering by IP address does not filter by country and therefore does not fulfill a contractual obligation for limited distribution. Whoever claims otherwise is misinformed or deliberately lying.

Also, very important note: unless the BBC has established offices/activities in Belgium, there's nothing to be sued about. As a british organization abiding by british laws, they couldn't care less what the Brussels copyright mafia has to say in belgian courts. The only exception to this i can think of is when the US copyright mafia gets involved and they will bribe (see The Pirate Bay trials) and push for foreign arrests (see Kim Dotcom arrest) because US government is subservient to their interests.

Now for my personal opinion: fuck copyright, fuck "rightholders", fuck the police and fuck the mafia. Just abolish money and private property: we have enough resources for everyone to live decently if we don't concentrate them in the hands of wealthy fuckers who'd like us all to suffer for their greed. Let the people who want to create art do so, and let the people who want to enjoy it do that too.

The unintended consequence of banning nation specific licensees, is that you'd essentially be giving a huge advantage to the already global services. Any service that isn't global, wouldn't be able to compete with those who already are.

Netflix is global, Prime is on its way, and Disney and HBO are trying. But a BBC streaming service is going to outbid 10/10 times because they can't afford to buy North American streaming rights when they don't have a (viable) North American service.

The BBC would survives because the law mandates UK citizen pay for it. But any non-subsidized local service would be dead in the water.

Don't you think it's a good thing if public money from the BBC is used to develop interesting programs instead of subsidizing Hollywood blockbusters? Who cares if i can't watch Spiderman on BBC STREAM? I've got torrents for that :-)

More seriously, Netflix business model is deeply broken. Trying to replicate that at all cost with public money is doomed to failure. A decent alternative would be the Global License [0] which was at the center of french public debate 15 years ago. It's more or less the same model, but without trying to feed ~parasites~ shareholders on the way, and without stupid competition between 5 different streaming services you all need a subscription for.

[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_globale

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