Internet Filtering in Canada: Rogers' NHL Blocking Order
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This year, because the NHL have done a deal with ESPN, I have to do a convoluted deal with a third party to get access to ESPN, and my experience is terrible. ESPN's Android app is terrible, the Google TV app flat out doesn't work, and casting from my phone to my TV craps out during period breaks and long ad breaks.
Piracy would be easier, better and cheaper than paying for things. It's the same reason Netflix reduced piracy, and now it's tanking. They created something that was easier, cheaper and better than piracy. Now with their increasing prices, declining quality, and fragmentation of their library, piracy is going to increase again.
The NHL is 100% the cause of NHL piracy. I have the money, give me an option that isn't retarded.
Similarly frustrating is trying to follow tennis in Canada. There is no comprehensive tennis streaming option, the ATP and WTA use separate apps that each have a $20/month subscription, and do not have rights to show any major tournaments. So for four months out of the year, you’re actually paying $20 for two weeks of tennis coverage, and you also need to pay for TSN streaming if you want to watch the biggest tournaments. All this adds up to $60+tax/month to follow _one_ sport!
Last US Open ESPN would play the same Home Depot commercial over and over and the first part of the commercial is someone using a circular saw. I have a massive phobia to saws and I couldn't change the stream fast enough to not see it in the commercial so I inevitably gave up. I'm a massive tennis fan, but I rarely watch the grand slams. .
The worst part of all this though is that there is a TennisTV App for the men's and a TennisChannel App for the women's. It's unbearable. Tennis coverage is broken. mdm_ you are not alone on this one.
I got it for the playoffs, it was easy, and I was ok with the pricing.
And the teams want it this way -- both the Leafs and Canadiens are tied into telco/cableco ownership, who has a vested interest in getting you to pay more for games.
Why won't they sell me a tier in their app where I can see all the games? I don't mind paying more.
When I was in Hawaii I couldn't watch any of the west coast teams - Mariners, Angels, Giants, Dodgers, A's, or Padres because they were the local teams.
And don't even get me started on the "it's easier to be a fan of a team far away than your local one" that is so common now because of all the restrictions.
The only reason why the MLB has a good app is because they can capture the thin slice of revenue teams miss out on from out-of-market fans with that app; there's generally not enough of those fans to drive a per-team standalone subscription service (although the MLB does offer one, it's not price-competitive with the full league option), so the league does it as a whole.
Are you willing to pay $300/year+ for MLBtv?
For every game? Absolutely. Sign me up.
For me to get my local teams and the games on ESPN I have to subscribe to a mid-level cable package which costs something like $1000 / year. To get the Peacock games, it's another $5 / month.
Given how many people I know who pay $80+ a month for cable only for sports, I guarantee you'd get a lot of takers for a "stream any game, any time, anywhere, $350/yr" plan for any of several major sports, including baseball.
[0] https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Valves-Gabe-Newell-Says-Pir...
It's tempting to look at Netflix and say, "oh they're stupid, why would they stop being like they were in 2012". The reality is that 2012 Netflix streaming was never going to last. They were dramatically underpricing their subscription because nobody in the TV industry understood streaming[0] and thus underpriced their TV shows. When TV companies realized, "oh no, people are actually cancelling cable to subscribe to Netflix", they started to charge Netflix higher rates... because it turns out the TV business sort of just requires that $100 + ad revenue come out of your pocket every month no matter if the bill collector is called Comcast or Netflix.
Sports are like this but worse. Out of that $100+ads that cable costs, the ad revenue pays for the entertainment, and the $100 pays for the sports, because pretty much every sport is far more extravagantly expensive to run than you'd think, and never pays its way for anything[1]. This is also why sports will often have extremely customer-hostile business practices and weird blackout policies - because the audience itself has been sold to other companies who can then force them to pay more money.
[0] Remember how there was a writers' strike about a decade and a half ago, over, among other things, streaming royalties? TV execs genuinely thought that Netflix was never really going to take off and replace cable. Just like how the music execs thought downloads were never really going to take off and replace CDs.
[1] If you really want to get angry, look up how much money your city is paying in tax credits to your local sports teams.
>because the audience itself has been sold to other companies who can then force them to pay more money
Again, don't care. The point is that I, as the consumer, can't pay to watch NHL games in a reasonable way, but the pirate's product is better and free. So! Is it immoral to "steal" from ESPN/NHL in this way? Maybe, but it strikes me as kinda like Mr. Burns setting up a sunshade so as to be able to force everyone to use nuclear power for their lights -- it's a way to try to make money, and aw-shucks things are expensive [0] so they've gotta make money, but it's not going to work terribly well because of the realities of the medium and the consumer's experience.
>It's tempting to look at Netflix and say, "oh they're stupid, why would they stop being like they were in 2012"
Your straw-reasoner doesn't seem to get that Netflix isn't the owner of the content they're trying to get you to pay money for. Understanding that 2012-Netflix is streaming things they've licensed at rates reasonable to them is key to understanding why modern-Netflix stopped being like they were in 2012 -- the rates are no longer reasonable, so the content gets dropped. In contrast, the NHL is the owner of the content they're trying to get you to pay money for.
The NHL could unwind itself from predatory audience-eyeball-deals, just as I, as the consumer, could jump through flaming hoops to get a low-quality legal stream, but neither party wants to do that. So!
[0] I'm well aware of the horrifying practice of municipal (and even higher levels of government!) spending on private sports arenas, but I was under the impression that sports teams printed money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_sports_le... suggests I'm not wrong...
The problem is that, as it stands, sports fans aren't going to do that. Remember, these are the same kinds of people who shout at city governments to keep subsidizing sports arenas so they don't lose "their team". The NHL has a massive money spigot and they're going to keep it flowing for as long as they can.
In San Diego, we had a stadium which had hosted 3 Super Bowls. The NFL team owner arranged for multiple referendums on the question of city subsidies for an improved stadium in a San Diego location he preferred. These votes failed. Then the owner moved the team to Los Angeles.
American fans: You can loose the bonds of subsidy to teams that believe they can get anything and be paid to take it.
I think it’s kinda the reverse - e.g. the AHL is able to pay its players, televise its games, and make do with an order of magnitude less revenue than the NHL. After adjusting contracts, etc. the NHL could presumably do the same.
Because Netflix was a better service than cable, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that. The change came from TV companies wanting their own streaming service too, basically bringing back the cable model to the internet.
If they don't want to depend on Netflix, why don't they cooperate to build a unified and neutral streaming service where they can share the revenue? Every Internet user would want to subscribe to that.
That’s exactly what Hulu was meant to be. It’s a fair thought that well-positioned people shared, but it turns out it’s not so simple.
Disney/HBO content is worth a lot more - they both have multiple billion dollar franchises - than Netflix.
With streaming, the middle man is cut out (versus cable) which makes a huge difference. Rather than buying a package of 100 channels from the cable company, I can instead subscribe to individual packages of content direct from much smaller packages of channels. Although I am paying more for the content I want, I save money because I'm not forced to subscribe to dozens of channels I will never watch.
Part of the whole premise of how the Internet was supposed to disrupt the publishing business was disintermediation - i.e. cutting out the middleman. Instead of everyone selling their works through a distributor, they'd sell them direct to the public. And that's basically what every streaming service turned into - including modern Netflix.
Cable companies used to be good, too. The shenanigans they resorted to with "packages" and price discrimination were the result of the same pricing pressure from the TV networks that killed 2012 Netflix. When Netflix refused to play that game, the TV networks decided to disrupt Netflix, because they own the content and Netflix owns nothing.
Sometimes innovation sucks.
A true neutral streaming service would be like a pirate streaming site: available globally, no geofencing, and one price for everything. 2012 Netflix showed that it can work.
Haven't seen a game since and now I spend my weekends watching F1 cars drive around in circles. They seem happy to have me as a fan so that's where my money goes these days.
Yes, it’s killing lots of Ukrainians, causing an energy crisis, and enhancing China’s relative position. Those are the horrifying consequences of Russia’s invasion, not of the fight against it. There’s no world in which you get to invade another country and then shame them for fighting back, at least without the derision of the rest of to world. What did you think would happen? “Ah, Russians think they ‘need’ to do this, better lay down and die”,
Of course the US is funding and arming Ukraine. It would be foolish not to. But what game are Ukrainians a pawn in? The fight for their own survival? If Russia doesn’t want to be “depleted” it need merely leave. The decision has always been in Putin’a hands.
Russia has the same degree of agency as any other country, but you are acting like it’s the pawn in its own foolish war. Perhaps Russia is a nation of children who think they are merely blown about by the wind, unable to take responsibility for even their most explicit actions?
Putin repeatedly kicked a massive tiger and then acted hurt, full of righteous indignation, when the tiger’s claws came out. No amount of mental gymnastics is going to change that.
Pawns are the players not making choices.
I don’t think that; I think instead that Russia is being foolish and contemptible in prosecuting an unjust and insane war, and is surprised to find out the world isn’t playing along. They are adults and they are responsible for their actions. And obviously the war is their action.
If so, that's a stupid strategy. Russia can easily defeat the US's strategy by leaving Ukraine.
It's a Biden strategy.. so classifying it as stupid makes sense. The thought is to prolong the war so Russia becomes weak and wastes resources and go bankrupt. Meanwhile it benefits China..
or asking somebody in Colombia to please help stop all that cocaine (or dunno)
there's something deeply flawed in the assumptions of how the world works when pleading to a random person in a country to please please influence the actions of the international institutions controlling the country.
(I personally think that EU should have stopped buying energy resources from Russia in 2014 after Crimea annexation. Instead, EU countries increased energy dependence on Russia and continued to fuel Putin's oppression and war machines)
As for my personal efforts, well, I don't think that there is a realistic way of doing something significant. I have protested Putin's regime for more than 10 years, was detained once, cops threatened to plant drugs on me, and do nasty things to my family. I don't think unarmed protests have any prospects in stopping Putin's regime anyway: Ukraine has an army with heavy weapons, Javelins and Baryaktars, and help from the West, and they still have difficulty stopping Putin's orcs. And whatever he has thrown on Ukraine he has at home - so good luck fighting that barehanded. By now I think everybody understands that if the protesters will gather enough strength so riot police would not be able to disperse them, he'll just order to mow the protesters down with machine guns and flamethrowers.
So, a few years ago I moved most of my business offshore to EU, and pay ~zero taxes to Putin's regime, but now this virtue signalling campaign by western businesses cancelling everything russian actually creates great difficulties to simply function. Russians were discriminated even before by EU and US institutions and banks, and now this discrimination is turned up to eleven. The sad irony is that most of these discriminating measures actually help Putin, like idiotic ban of Visa / Mastercard payments - now Russian people have great difficulty paying for foreign VPS services, for example, and can only visit websites that perpetuate existing state propaganda.
If I were winning, the demagogueries we call democracies would be extinguished from existence, and new nations would be forming in their place.
And as far as Russia goes; it would have never gotten this far if 'I' were winning.
The Cabal is winning, and they have been for years now. Russia vs Ukraine is just their latest plaything.
Nothing we do or say will end this bullshit until the rest of you do what is right for once in your lives, and not just whatever is most convenient to you.
Have a nice day. Might be your last. Who knows? Nobody.
("в Украине" does not really have negative connotations, and sounds about as correct in Russian as "on Ukraine" sounds in Russian. Still, some Ukrainians are offended by this form and believe it to be a denigrating towards their independent country. Needless to say that after Crimea annexation such demands increased tenfold and, after the war started, a further tenfold)
There are other Slavic languages like Czech and Polish, which have exactly same spelling "na Ukraine", but Ukrainians somehow give them a pass. Coming to our issue, some Ukrainians also insist that Ukraine should be called THE Ukraine in English. I sometimes comply with this request.
This is all the justification that is required.
Respect them or don't. There is no try.
This team is in the Pac-12, which has its own media company https://pac-12.com/
My choice is literally just: 1) Subscribe to Satellite, or XFinity(comcast), or sling and make sure I pick a tier that has the Pac12 Network, ABC and FOX (local affiliates that carry some home games) and ESPN, and between them get many of the games live.
I would much, much rather just give my money directly to the pac12 network, and be able to live-stream all of the football games for my teams I like (and basketball, etc)as they happen, but apparently, that isn't a thing.
Piracy is so much easier, because of the business descisions that have been made by media companies to offer 'exclusive' content.
"Piracy" is the full realization of the potential of our computer and internet technologies. They will never, ever be able to compete it with it without legal backing.
And before the typical “I don’t like Marvel drek” response, a bunch of HN posters don’t matter. Disney has multiple billion+ franchises
...Respondents have no obligation to verify whether the IP addresses to be blocked ... have been correctly identified, and are wholly reliant on the Plaintiffs or their appointed agent accurately identifying and communicating ... such IP addresses
I get the practical reason, but it's very dangerous that a single entity gets to dictate what to block and customers who are impacted in error have limited recourse (I hope we see some of them apply to the court for relief).
Also the judge left us an out:
Respondent shall not be in breach of this Order where it suspends in part compliance with paragraph 2 because the capacity of its blocking system is exceeded by the number of IP addresses for the Target Servers notified
Everybody and your toaster, go get your IPv6 addresses and overwhelm their blocklists! Finally a use for my internet-enabled fridge / toothbrush / toilet flusher.
For those who are able, it looks like non-residential plans may be exempt.
Just like a postal address is no substitute for an identity document, an IP is no substitute for a content identifier.
The only thing that uniquely identifies content, is the content itself or a derivative identifier. However, TLS encryption will make these identifiers unreadable for the routing party.
This problem cannot be solved reliably at the routing level as long as encryption prevents inspection of the internet packets.
The consensus at this point seems to be to just accept the false positives and negatives and ignore the consequences.
- By definition, any IP can serve any content. - → To block ANY content, you need to block ALL IP addresses.
On the other hand, Bell will raise their rates by 10% every year, and if you forget to call them after the 24 months of "reduced rates/credit" (whatever they call it) your monthly rate will double.
I guess Cloudflare could block the stream, hopefully in time for that to not happen, but it seems risky.
If the stream uses something like https://webtorrent.io/, your going to have to block the IP of everyone else in the world watching it.
Long story short, the decision makers live in a small bubble that tells them what they want to hear
Reality of the situation is that I could not watch 1/2 of the games I wanted to because of blackout rules and other broadcast conflicts. If a game is blacked out, I'm screwed. If a game is playing on the NHL Network, I'm screwed. If a game is playing nationally, I'm screwed. I'm paying $25/month to catch 1, maybe 2 games a week.
I no longer pay to watch hockey. There are other means that have a substantially better experience and I never miss a game. The NHL did this to themselves due to their antiquated business model and hubris.
Unfortunately these companies have little incentive to improve. Because what can my parents do? Go watch on a competitor? That isn't an option because of the stupid exclusivity deals. It is like how EA has a monopoly on most sporting franchises for being the only one who can produce games. You end up in a state where they release year after year new games that often suck, but no other company can compete as they can't use the franchise or players in their games.
Exclusivity almost always seems to be a negative for the public.
There are ways to not have any issues catching any game you want to watch, but older people are simply not going to be stream hunting... but that's what all the young people are doing.
Just like how I've gone back to pirating tv shows. It's just easier and more reliable. I don't want to hunt for where each tv show is on which network. Streaming is starting to feel no different than having to buy cable packages. It used to just be simple and cost effective to just have Netflix. But now each company got greedy and switched to exclusivity. Each with their own shitty video players.
I have Amazon Prime and have a better experience watching Amazon Exclusives via a downloaded file on Plex than I do using their player. Especially considering Amazon's service has ads that play mid tv show.
I guess a lot of this comes down to the same principle I mentioned in my original comment. Exclusivity is almost never a good thing for a customer. Whether it's streaming or ISPs that have a monopoly on internet infrastructure, it's never good for the customer.
Though reviewing the order, I have a bittersweet suspicion this judge and the defendants might have done a better job than parliament will when they eventually take a crack at a legislated framework.
I imagine that Teksavvy, et. al. would not do it, but the point of the exploit is that the lists are dynamic, supplied by the NHL/ESPN/whoever. Get the provider to make a list that blocks everything.
Could be as simple as creating a web site posting that there is an intention to stream a game. Just a list: "I hear that you can watch the upcoming Leafs game on IP a.b.c.d". Let NHL/ESPN/whoever scrape it. Start with providing nothing but "bad actors". Spring the trap by flooding with sites you desire to be blocked, you know, just before the next playoffs.
This is pretty much the same strategy used to poison bittorrent feeds. More effective, though. In the case of bittorrent, only really popular torrents can be poisoned. In this case, there are a very limited number of targets that need to be attacked.
We call it "filtering", "anti hate speech", or "anti child-porn".
I think copyright enforcement should be seen as a form of censorship, regardless of whether or not one agrees with copyright laws.
This Wikipedia article about internet censorship seems to have been partially written by people who think that copyright enforcement is a form of censorship as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship
And then the First Amendment promptly nullified that power by categorically stating that the freedom of speech shall not be infringed. Distribution of content is speech, and copyright enforcement penalizes it, which infringes the freedom of speech. This is how the exceptions for Fair Use came about, by attempting to reconcile the Copyright Clause with the First Amendment, but Fair Use is only a half-measure which does not fully avoid the infringement of the freedom of speech. When you have Rule A saying that you may do something and Rule B saying that you must not do that thing, they don't combine to create a compromise rule which says that you can do that thing most of the time with a few narrow exceptions.
A case that sort of rubs up against this in the U.S. -- I use an American example because in Canada s.1 circumscribes all legal rights, including freedom of expression, so it would be academic whether this raised speech concerns or not -- is Morse v. Frederick.
In this case, a student, Frederick, raised a banner that read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" in front of some television cameras. The behaviour occurred off school grounds but nearby, and during an event that students were allowed to leave school early to attend. The school suspended Frederick because his banner promoted drug use.
A lot of the ruling relied on parsing what category of speech this banner was. One argument is that it was essentially dadaist, absurdist speech (Frederick's claim. Another argument is that it was promoting criminal behaviour (the school principal's claim; Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito in the opinion). Another argument is that it was political speech, aimed at contesting a public policy (Stevens, Souter, Ginsberg in dissent; Alito and Kennedy in concurrence)
Although there were other issues in the case, namely to do with how speech is regulated within schools and whether this constituted a school event, one of the undercurrents is that constitutional protections for political speech seem to be more crucial to many of the justices than constitutional protections for gibberish speech.
So I don't think it's crazy to suggest, at a minimum, that there exists a well-support denotative use of "censorship" that specifically refers to speech with political characteristics, rather than all speech. Through that lens, copyright enforcement could either be censorship (to the extent that the enforcement is designed or has the effect of prohibiting the dissemination of political speech or prohibits commentary on a public policy) or not (to the extent the content being restricted is fundamentally apolitical). And this is true even if there are other denotations that consider stopping any speech to be censorship.
Censorship is prohibiting speech or blocking a speaker because of the content or alleged content of their speech.
Not all censorship is unconstitutional. The legal blocking of curse words amd nudity on broadcast TV is clearly censorship regardless of if the intent or effect of cursing while nude on TV is political.
It is true that free speech protections against the censorship of political speech do tend to be stronger.
Also generally speaking, rules that prohibit speech in certain contexts or manners without regard for their content or the speaker (thus not censorship) tend are held to a lower standard for legal justification than laws that do engage in censorship.
In this case, the question is does this type qualify as "not-censorship" because somehow blocking "content that infringes our IP" is not restricting speech on the basis on its content. To me it seems obvious that this is a restriction of speech that depends on it's alleged content.
To the federal courts, too, which is why “fair use” was a court-created Constitutional limit on copyright before it was incorporated into the statute (the reason for the weird standards in the statute is that the factors from the court-issued rule were incorporated directly into the statute.)
But that's not germane, because “censorship” is not restricted to “restrictions on speech that violate the First Amendment”, so the US Supreme Court “parsing about which category of speech” something is has no bearing on the meaning of “censorship.” In fact, consideration of what category speech is only matters in the First Amendment context after one has determined that censorship (and, particularly, government censorship) is occurring. Only then is it important to parse the details of which set of standards to apply to determine if the government censorship involved is Constitutionally prohibited.
It's not about who does it, it's about why they do it. Is blocking illegal-due-to-copyright content a slippery slope to blocking illegal-because-opressive-regime-said-so content? Yes. Is "slippery slope" a bad argument? Also yes.
I agree having court-enforced IP block lists controlled by private companies is bad. But that isn't censorship, it's just stupid.
I might, depends on the context. Copyright laws can indeed result in censorship. Let's say those DVDs have an additional commentary track.
> But that isn't censorship, it's just stupid.
So when your IP address gets block in Canada for a year, regardless of what content or speech it was engaged in amd without any attempt to verify that you indeed were sharing content out of copyright, you aren't being censored? Come on.
Blocking illegal content isn't censorship. It creates the technical framework and weak precedent for censorship and I agree we shouldn't do it this way, but it's not more censorship than seizing a bunch of copied DVDs at the border would be.
Does your definition depend on what is illegal? For example, if an incumbent government were able to illegalize media from opposing parties, and ISPs blocked the websites of those parties, is it filtering or censorship?
On top of that, the insane prices are regulated by the CRTC, a regulatory body controlled by the companies that are setting the prices and think this is totally fair.
To be precise, the CRTC is theorically an independent public entity. In practice however, the chairman since 2017 is Ian Scott, an ex-lobbyist who worked for ISPs and telecommunications companies. He's been caught meeting with one of our major ISPs' (Bell) then-COO, now CEO Mirko Bibic, right before overturning their own 2019 order that would have forced large ISPs to lower their wholesale rates to smaller ISPs, rolling them back to previous (much higher) 2016 values.
The CRTC is a joke.
You wouldn't say that they GPDR or anti-tracking web browser tech is censorship, would you?
I’m guessing most authoritarian censorship is, in the local legal system, just seizing illegal goods.
Wether its censorship or not is more dependent on the type of information/goods, and to some extent the moral or cultural framework of the observer.
Is the suggested ban in Sweden on posting photos/videos of dead people censorship or just a reasonable way to protect relatives of e.g terrorist attacks?
> not more censorship than seizing a bunch of copied DVDs at the border would be.
If your IP is being blocked in a country due to a court order you are absolutely being censored.
> If your IP is being blocked in a country due to a court order you are absolutely being censored.
That's a nonsense statement. Declaring something illegal is how governments censor.
Does the law say "you may not write bad things about the government or good things about gay people and if you do we'll block your site"? Anything blocked under that law is censorship. Does it say "you must have permission from the rightsholder to distribute any copyrighted material and if you don't we'll block your site"? Blocking under that law, whether you agree with it or not, isn't censorship.
But that is not "illegal content" - that is illegal sharing of legal content. The government making content itself illegal is much much the definition of censorship.
This is bad, but it's really not censorship in the same sense that China censors Tiananmen Square, etc. You can talk about the NHL game, write about it in the news, share screenshots, teach it in school, upload an animated recreation on Youtube...
> upload an animated recreation on Youtube
https://www.quora.com/What-do-Chinese-citizens-particularly-...
When a government tells ISPs to block content that it believes doing so serves a greater good, that is filtering.
You can argue all day about the greater good and if filtering is justified, but the difference is China explicitly censors opposing viewpoints.
If Germany blocks sites promoting the Nazi party, is that doing good because such promotion does bad, or is it censoring an opposing political viewpoint that's competing with it for power? Even if the government has the support of most of the population, it's still a political power struggle between them and the Nazis.
Democracy is done in America if more people think the government controlling what people read and think is some sort of social good.
You can have good intentions, but still cause terrible things to happen.
In the last year we saw government's pushing experimental drug on healthy young people in order to add a few extra months of life to 75+ year olds with multiple health conditions, and the extremely obese. Locking down, destroying small business and causing serious food price inflation, that will send millions of people around the world into absolute poverty. A drug that did not stop transmission, had pages worth of short-term side effects, and yet to be determined long term effects. One thing it did not due, was lower the 3x jabbed from catching covid, since they get infected now at highest rates now. How long before we go from "safe and effective" to "no one forced you to take it".
It really is debatable what if anything governments COVID policy accomplished. Why shouldn't people be able to debate it?
If a VPN can do the trick, I think it would be hilarious if TekSavvy provided a free vpn to all their customers.
> The latest version of the list of sites to be blocked does not require us to block any IP addresses, so we are not doing so.
This is very scary.
They're a link aggregator, and do not host any content, so hopefully this link is kosher on HN.
It will be interesting to see when IP addresses start being added that belong to competing ISPs or platforms that are politically opposed to the board of directors of Rogers & their political interests. For example, recently Ed Rogers fought to not have Masai Ujiri be the Raptors President and it was discussed on the Internet. Ed Rogers went to court to fight his siblings for control of the company. It was also discussed how Ed Rogers hangs out at Mar-a-Lago. Does Ed Rogers have the power to say put the IP addresses of every site that mentions the bad behaviour of Ed Rogers on the list?
What is the process? Do people sign off in meeting minutes notes with an audited trail that this address is being added or why, or is it just someone adding whomever their boss tells them to?
Doesn’t seem like this should be the role of government, but not surprising for Canada. On the spectrum of irrational distrust of government to irrational trust of government, any population is going to have a distribution. Canada skews towards greater trust of government, with more broad and intense irrational trust in government in the last few years than I’d ever noticed in the decades prior.
Finally, I don’t get what purpose your final paragraph adds to the conversation? This is a court order. It has nothing to do with executive action from the government, rather a judge ruling that the ISPs must block pirated sports.
I believe that last paragraph to be an observation that is obvious to most people.
The person made a false assumption in their first paragraph, and then linked that false information to his second that is really not that relevant here.
If you read the article, it even states:
6. That didn't stop Bell, Rogers, and Quebecor, who went straight to the Federal Court in 2019, asking for an order against themselves to block a streaming service called GoldTV. They also asked the court to order other ISPs to do the same, including TekSavvy.
In addition, they have tried this twice before, through the Federal Government, and it didn't work:
2. For years, media companies in Canada have asked the government to use Internet filtering—or "site blocking"—to help enforce copyrights. In 2017, through a coalition called FairPlay, they asked the CRTC to create a site-blocking regime. They lost. https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2018/2018-384.htm
3. They made a similar pitch to the federal government committee reviewing the Copyright Act in 2018. I was there to oppose it. In its report, the INDU committee recommended studying a limited, copyright-specific injunction that balanced interests. https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/421/INDU/Reports...
So to write that ALL IS CORRUPT and the Government is the baddie is unnecessary. These corporate people, and I certainly am not on their side, are just trying the numbers game. They will keep asking their lawyers to keep trying in order to restrict their product/service so they "make more money". I certainly don't agree with Rogers and Bell, but let's not mislead people here.
At this point, we are going off topic.
This sounds like a species of fish.
I went fishing for marlin but we accidentally caught an endangered _loquacious sesquipedalian treatise_ and had to throw it back before the fish and game officer saw it
They are the 2 major telcos of Canada that all Canadians love to complain about.
I really don’t understand your last paragraph.
Rogers and Bell own two of the most popular (if not the two most popular) teams in Canada -- Rogers owns the Leafs, Bell owns the Canadiens.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maple_Leaf_Sports_%26_Entertai...
I forgot about the degree to which Rogers is vertically integrated (ISP, cable provider, landline and cell provider, TV stations, radio, partial ownership in all major sports teams, etc.) and the degree to which this is a duopoly with Bell in Canada. But it's no wonder they can get the courts to issues these orders against themselves (and their smaller competitors) to legitimize actions that protect their broader interests.
Weirder still is that Rogers has apparently sub-licensed the English-language broadcast of NHL in Canada to the state-owned broadcaster, CBC: https://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/nhl/deal-gives-rogers-rights...
One hand washes the other.
What's going on is that the vertically-integrated entertainment/communications cartel is refining its regulatory capture through the judicial branch of of the Canadian government in order to launder artificial restrictions on competition at the expense of consumers and taxpayers. It's how they pay me my big fat dividend checks so I can contribute their massive quarterly profits through my taxes, since I don't watch sports.
I mean didn't they just decide that the constitution not applies and start freezing bank accounts and detaining people for political speech the government didn't like?
The kicker of course, was the influx of gambling ads on TSN this season, thankfully, at least on the NHL app for the other games the ads are replaced by the gentle ice making video :-)
Yes, the VPN will work in some instances, but despite being savvy, my spouse will never fart around with the hoops to get the VPN on the Apple TV which is where most games get streamed.
The whole thing needs to burnt down and re-built with a model that doesn't suck so bad.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.I find that these broadcast exclusivity deals are not compatible with todays tech and should be thrown out the window. They cause people to pirate content because they can't legally or easily purchase it in some regions.
The NHL should offer all their games directly to anyone who wants them anywhere in the world which they do except for the US and Canada. If a cable company/tv station wants to carry them they do not get exclusivity.
>DNS blocking is a way of basically taking a phone number out of the phone book...then we're going to be back here five years from now talking about why we need to implement deep packet inspection,
How about we make it mandatory to enforce transparency on the assets of the bad guys? Who are the ad networks that are allowing the blatant monetization of illegal content?
Why are the hosting providers who presently find it easy to detect and kick off workloads deemed damaging to their infrastructure such as crypto mining unable to detect illegal video hosts?
Don't get me wrong, i'm staunchly in the bucket of the free transfer of information, but i simply cannot turn a blind eye to crime.
If you mean USSR and the likes, those guys were claiming to "build" communism, with authoritarian socialism ("dictatorship of the proletariat") as the ostensibly required temporary stage that was supposed to be brief and kept getting indefinitely extended. However, none of them have ever claimed to achieve it.
It works today because the owners of capital need workers to make that capital produce something useful, and even with all the economic rent fleeced from them, those workers still retain enough to then buy the products (if not their own, then that produced by somebody else). This enables money to cycle in the economy. But the more things are automated, the more people are unemployed, and - in capitalism - effectively excluded from the productive economy. So it's a question of how many people you can so exclude before the whole thing crumbles down.
Maybe capitalism will be replaced at some point but you and I will be long dead before that ever happens.
I mean the USSR was willing to murder people who opposed the idea and it still failed.
And China tried it and abandoned it out of failure true.
Your rationale is the “no true Scotsman” fallacy.
And it was a massive failure.
It's a "no true Scotsman" fallacy because as long as attempts at moving to a communism model fail, supporters will just say "that wasn't true communism" ignoring the fact that if you can't actually create a functioning communist system that's indicative of failure of the model itself.
But here we're talking about communism naturally arising out of technological post-scarcity. What does that have to do with Soviet model of "public" (actually, state) ownership, or killing dissidents, or violently oppressing anyone?
Maybe try selling it?
Paramount refuses to sell Star Trek in my country, or let other people sell it, thus Paramount gets no money from me.
My understanding of region blocks in the US with sports games is they are often blocked but there's no way to subscribe to ESPN or whatever to watch it because another broadcaster has the rights to show it, but have decided to show it later that night (not live), or not show it at all.
When people can just google " f movies <insert_movie_name_here>" and watch the movie series you mention in HD, unfettered, and ad networks reap the reward of turning a blind eye. . . this makes a sustainable market for legitimate goods impossible because the scale simply does not exist for enough people to subscribe to a streaming service or to invest in paying to watch so the costs drop at scale etc.
I just finished watching the first Jurassic World with the kids, if cost £3.50 on apple. I have a feeling I may have a dvd or bluray of it somewhere in a box as I've seen it before, and it wasn't at the Cinema, but it wasn't worth the half hour trying to find it.
Discovery Season 1-3 was on netflix, Picard and Lower decks on Amazon Prime. Discovery Season 4 came out on amazon and apple at something like £2 or £3 an episode.
That's how you make money. It doesn't cost a lot to put your program on platforms like Amazon or Apple (Presumably it's a simple "x% of the price in commission").
It seems like these sports leagues could easily bring thousands of viewers back into the fold by not trying to charge thousands just to watch one stream. It’s just not feasible since most sports-watchers watch every sport and don’t have the multi-thousands to purchase every streaming package.
Is that surprising? The pirate operations don't contribute to the production of the sporting events or anything at all, they just have hosting/streaming costs.
- blocking of IP addresses on an ISP level, introduced via court order
- folks who organize hockey lose some revenue
For me, the former is a 10/10, the latter maybe a 3/10. About as severe as ..bike theft. Happens all over the place, costs normal people quite a bit of money and distress, and no one does a thing about it.
This reflects an inappropriate influence of that sports league on law and society, don't you think?
We have businesses investing legally in producing and securing rights to content. We then have internet ads businesses incentivizing unverified actors to convert any impressions to hundreds of thousands of dollars in payouts even if those impressions occur on stolen content. How is this fair?
The legitimate businesses are losing their ability to re invest proceeds into their business thus permanently impairing them since who's to say the high price of streaming and linear TV is not a consequence of stolen revenue thanks to these illegal streams?
We will never know since society has turned a blind eye and has decided "Just too bad, let those assholes die, it's not my problem" while Ad networks and criminals laugh their way to the bank.
But the solution of turning off parts of the internet by blocking I.P.s which could block large parts of the internet if for example a pirate uses cloud flare is unacceptable.
It’s also problematic that it could end up blocking all kinds of locally hosted content from any number of ISPs using dynamic IPs. Your IP could end up blocked and other ISPs would prohibit video games from connecting to you because someone else used the same I.P. for some type of content piracy earlier.
I’m calling the rogue elements of the internet, ie ad networks that behave in a scummy manner with zero transparency, integrity and self regulation , as the bad nodes. I don’t advocate for the blocking of IPs , I advocate for legal challenges that provoke a wider response (regulatory, policy, etc). The judicial system staying largely silent instead of issuing rulings in favor of the plaintiff that at least find the Content to be of a stolen and illegal nature while dismissing the petition to block the IPs , gives them some recourse in law. . .right now, the status is ambiguous , so allowed. Which is really pathetic of us as a society.
You can't be serious when you claim that illegal streams raking in tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars for popular sports through plague like ad banners are the innocent party that should be allowed to operate freely.
Why not punish all the ad networks that, in retrospect allow their ads to be shown on these illegal streams? Don't they have an obligation to ensure their ad models aren't supporting illegal businesses?
The dual standards by intelligent tech workers who should know better is one of the biggest shames of our time.
The internet is a vast ocean of interdependencies, its not like the tangible world, as such, it requires different strategies to combat. This is why the software gaming industry is flourishing and not declining because someone decided to work on the problem from the point of the service, and the rest followed suit.
But leaving that aside, the existence of illegal activity doesn't automatically justify arbitrarily severe measures to suppress it. With pretty much anything, there's a line that we draw and say, "this is what you can use to enforce it". The measures that were proposed above are way past any sensible line in a free society, especially for a strictly economic crime.
I think this falls under argument from lack of imagination. Overreach shouldn't be justified because we haven't yet figured out how to solve the problem. I still lock my car and house. I invest in that security because it is important to me. I think they could invest in their own solutions to solve some of those problems without gov't interference.
“We haven’t figured out how to prosecute criminal theft in the open on the internet where we choose to allow ad networks and hosts to blatantly flout the laws our societies are built on”
And I’m the one making an argument with a lack of imagination?