EU Opinion: Streaming Services Are Not Liable for VPN ‘Pirates’ | Hacker News Reader

EU Opinion: Streaming Services Are Not Liable for VPN ‘Pirates’

torrentfreak.com

30 pointsgslin7 comments

Geo blocking is streaming and content companies living in the past. They are creating this issue them selves but are too stupid or old to stop selling exclusive rights to TV and streaming services in other countries. At the same time these foreign companies need to stop wasting money on something that will eventually go away.

How stupid is it for HBO to sell exclusive rights in part of Europe for their shows to Sky streaming when HBO can deliver this content directly. This isn't 90, people are hardly watching cable TV.

This whole thing reminds me of blockbuster that didn't want to lose that small percentage of late fees in order to switch to a Netflix type model. Just no competing system at the moment.

I guess it's easier to sell a shit show to a single entity then trying to convince your subscribers to watch it.

> the person who bypasses the restrictions should be held responsible, not the platform where they are published.

I wonder where this line of thinking will lead. Will content licensors start demanding logs from streaming services and go after vpn users directly?

They can if they want to. The licensors don’t have to comply though.

>One of the key questions for the CJEU is whether online streaming services are liable for copyright infringement if their subscribers use VPN services to bypass geo-blocking efforts. EU Advocate General Maciej Szpunar shared his advice on the matter this week... The opinion of AG Szpunar compares the current case to existing EU jurisprudence on hyperlinks, concluding that a streaming service doesn’t violate the law when subscribers bypass its geo-blocking efforts.

Why do EU folks use malware laden streaming services that harm the earth (wastes electricity) rather than torrent stuff as needed then hold onto it in the medium term?

Aside from being worried about leaving... extreme content... behind on the hard drive... it doesn't make sense to stream over and over, especially if it's an unreliable source like some shady streaming service that's probably got all sorts of weird javascript lurking alongside whatever is used to play the video.

(With "the video" probably just being something on Youtube hoping no one copyright flags it)

I never kept a formal library, just would fill the empty space on my hard drive with axxo rips, stuff rotten tomatoes said was good, and whatever was well seeded that wasn't hardcore pornography.

(I always found the mix of "Welcome to the internet, here is a high(ish) resolution DVD rip of your favorite Sofia Coppola film. Would you also like some incredibly degrading pornography?" you get when you sort by what's well seeded incredibly dark in a bad way, and that's speaking as someone who may have briefly ended up on a department of homeland security watchlist because I researched United States v. Valle too much back when I was attempting OSCP.)

Anyways, good decision IMHO but I'm not European right now, so I guess my opinion doesn't matter :-)

> Why do EU folks use malware laden streaming services that harm the earth (wastes electricity) rather than torrent stuff as needed then hold onto it in the medium term?

I want to be sympathetic to your position on moral grounds, but I am having a hard time understanding this more technical complaint... I certainly have a lot of downloaded media but it isn't clear to me that it saves electricity?

I also feel like you are making an assumption that people watch the same content over and over again, which maybe is true for a hardcore fan of a show like The Office, but I am a heavy user of these services--watching content (maybe only passively while doing other tasks) almost all day, every day--and it is extremely rare that I watch the same content even twice.

(It is sufficiently rare that I can cite a very notable-to-me example: I decided to watch How I Met Your Mother through a second time this month, but since the last time I watched it was a decade ago it isn't clear to me that it would have made sense--with respect to your stated electricity concern--for me to maintain the storage locally for that entire show for a decade--during which time I have needed to replace all the disks on my home RAID array at least once--on the off chance that I suddenly got inspired to watch that show again.)

>I want to be sympathetic to your position on moral grounds, but I am having a hard time understanding this more technical complaint... I certainly have a lot of downloaded media but it isn't clear to me that it saves electricity?

Sorry, you make good points and I wrote that when I was high yesterday, allow me to clarify:

The idea is if you download something, then rewatch it, you only use the energy used to transmit it once. (My mind is a bit weird -- I remember people talking a lot in the 2000s about how assymetric schemes like PGP are more CPU intensive than stuff like AES, which I always found interesting since the weird quantum people seemed to indicate all... that... would more impact public key stuff... but I digress...

Sorry if I rambled. I was a bit out of it yesterday due to... spooky season.

I'll clarify a bit, but thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts. :-)

>I also feel like you are making an assumption that people watch the same content over and over again, which maybe is true for a hardcore fan of a show like The Office, but I am a heavy user of these services--watching content (maybe only passively while doing other tasks) almost all day, every day--and it is extremely rare that I watch the same content even twice.

Thanks for pointing that out, I hadn't thought about that consumption pattern. (Like seriously, I can sometimes troll a bit but I appreciate the insight).

I'm trying to avoid the word "hardcore" (it's a long story involving Kamala Harris' sorority and an obscure branch of the Freemasons) but I am also a fan of The Office -- I had a coworker who had a JD who seemed a mixture of amused and horrified as I asked a series of clarifying questions about the internal culture at law firms and then was like "Oh, so they'd get mad if you put up a Netflix video while working to concentrate instead of listen to the radio? That's stupid."

>(It is sufficiently rare that I can cite a very notable-to-me example: I decided to watch How I Met Your Mother through a second time this month, but since the last time I watched it was a decade ago it isn't clear to me that it would have made sense--with respect to your stated electricity concern

I never watched that show because I got it confused with Two and a Half Men -- one of the few times someone decided to be nice and smoke me out, the shit was way too intense, so I ended up fucking up and buying an entire bag of these... peppermint patty things? I forget the name other than it's those things they came out with around the same time they started refusing to sell sane sized portion of Lays chips in the stores to hide how some prices had gone up. Anyways, they were basially hunks of mint with some chocolate, and I'd skipped a meal or two so I ate the bag, zoned out for what felt like a long time but now I realize was probably just like 20 minutes, then the folks I was with kind of peppered me with questions and laughed -- I think they thought it was amusing how paranoid I got?

Anyways, that's how it is with me. You might get a weird ancedote about a leading policy NGO, a zero day exploit, or just a string of obscenity and weird smells -- it's a mixed bag.

Thanks for being willing to chat! ;-)

Oh to be clear, my complaint is that you could download a file once, then store it locally, versus streaming the same file repeatedly uses more energy and bandwidth.

Ok, that's a fair point -- I'm a big fan of the Office, thanks for pointing out that consumption pattern.

>It is sufficiently rare that I can cite a very notable-to-me example: I decided to watch How I Met Your Mother through a second time this month, but since the last time I watched it was a decade ago it isn't clear to me that it would have made sense--with respect to your stated electricity concern--for me to maintain the storage locally for that entire show for a decade--during which time I have needed to replace all the disks on my home RAID array at least once--on the off chance that I suddenly got inspired to watch that show again.

Ah, that makes sense. I actually had HIMYM confused with... a Charlie Sheen show whose name I forget, because both played in a hotel room I got high in ages ago. I'd see people mention it and be like "Oh yeah Charlie Sheen wasn't he in the news" and go off and read gossip about someone who wasn't even on the show.

And "notable-to-me" is probably a phrase I'll hold onto, I think sometimes I forget it's not 2009 anymore and when I'm out on sites like this there's not the same... shared camraderie... there was when I started this journey. The internet has gotten bigger, and meaner.

(But HN seems to capture something Slashdot never did -- some people piss me off, but I don't see the stupid hot grits rude memery here I did there, just people exhaustively insisting maybe it's OK to use Windows and other miscellaneous bullshit)

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