New Zealand ISPs Back Down On Anti-Geoblocking Support 50
angry tapir writes: A number of New Zealand Internet service providers will no longer offer their customers support for circumventing regional restrictions on accessing online video content. Major New Zealand media companies SKY, TVNZ, Lightbox and MediaWorks filed a lawsuit in April, arguing that skirting geoblocks violates the distribution rights of its media clients for the New Zealand market. The parties have reached an out-of-court settlement.
We, the one who pay our hard earned cash ... (Score:5, Insightful)
... always got short changed
Country by country, region by region, media by media, they will find ways to fleece us
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... always got short changed
Country by country, region by region, media by media, they will find ways to fleece us
People never ever learn the lesson.
What's the difference between
-pirating content
-paying to access content your not allowed because of ip geographic restrictions ?
For media companies NONE AT ALL. THEY'RE THE SAME THING.
So save yourself trouble, and pirate directly. The end result is exactly the same.
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Mod up!
It's infuriating as an expat to try to get content in the language I want. Yes, there are solutions, but almost all are technically illegal one way or the other.
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It's even more infuriating for non-expats who are not native speakers of English. Nobody except my long dead grandpa wants localized content, except perhaps for books, but even literary translations are getting less and less popular. Most literary translations suck, too, especially for genres like Science Fiction. Movies are the worst, their lip syncing is an abomination. And don't let me get started with video games, for some reason foreign voice actors are always worse than the original.
Almost everybody s
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Get half a dozen boxes all over the world (Score:3, Interesting)
One in Germany, one in UK, one in LA, one in SEA. You can have access to every damn file on the Internet.
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Too bad you can't watch anything region locked to within New Zealand.
Re:Get half a dozen boxes all over the world (Score:5, Funny)
There is absolutely no content that is region-locked to New Zealand that is worth watching, that isn't already available elsewhere.
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Nobody wants to watch Shortland Street anyway...
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I've seen Shortland Street on ipt
Too many negations (Score:2)
A better title would be: (Score:2)
New Zealand ISPs cave and support Geoblocking
Free Trade... (Score:4, Insightful)
So why does "Free Trade" not apply to tax payers / voters ?
I can buy Books, DVDs, CDs, in fact any physical item and ship it to New Zealand. Why can I not do the same with Digital Media (which is what DVDs etc are anyway).
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Actually NZ was an interesting case.
The Movie "The Piano" was a NZ movie, however it was not released as a zone 4 DVD.
The Labour government (left leaning) at the time said "If you legally buy the DVD from overseas, you should be able to play it" and made zoning illegal as it was an anti-competitive measure. The National Government (Right leaning) scrapped it, however it is still easy to get DVD players that are unzoned.
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TPPA will give corporations the ability to have VPNs and VPN users in signatory nations shut down, and will be used to do exactly that.
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What if I run my own VPN?
Future parent company already calling the shots? (Score:4, Informative)
What the article doesn't state is that CallPlus is in the midst of being acquired by Australian company M2, and there has been speculation that M2 is behind the sudden settlement. Up until now, CallPlus were quite proudly sticking up for Global Mode.
It is a shame that this is not being tested in court. I do believe that the Section 226(b) of the New Zealand Copyright Act would have applied here:
"for the avoidance of doubt, [a Technological Protection Measure] does not include a process, treatment, mechanism, device, or system to the extent that, in the normal course of operation, it only controls any access to a work for non-infringing purposes (for example, it does not include a process, treatment, mechanism, device, or system to the extent that it controls geographic market segmentation by preventing the playback in New Zealand of a non-infringing copy of a work)"
It is the one reason that region free DVD and BluRay players are legal here. New Zealanders were using Global Mode to view legitimate content that they paid for; content that was otherwise unavailable to them due to geographic market separations.
The ones to lose out here are the various studios that are content producers. At least with Global Mode, people were still paying for the content. Now, with the demise of Global Mode, and the hassle of having to sort out a separate VPN provider, the number of people turning back to torrenting is just going to explode. Of course this is all because the local Media Distributors want their cut, as if the millions they already get weren't enough. These are the same Media Distributors who delay releases by months or even years to try to capitalize on popularity while paying the lowest possible price for broadcast rights (the reason many NZers flocked to Global Mode in the first place).
Given their talk in about this being so illegal, the fact that NZ Media Distributors are not proceeding with testing this in court means they have probably realised that a conclusive victory in their favour is simply not possible. Of course this does not stop them from trumpeting this as a win for them, which it really isn't.
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At least up until now, 'technological protection measure' that protects access to a copyright work means some sort of DRM system. If you purchase something on ITMS, or stream a Netflix video or the like, using a VPN
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it doesn't seem at all clear that 'geoblocking' qualifies.
What else is geoblocking other than geographic market separation? There is no other use for geoblocking other than to control access so that different regions can be charged differently to maximise profits. The way that section of the Copyright Act is worded does not make Technological Protection Measures absolutely the same as DRM; it covers DRM, but can be applied to other things too.
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Do not mistake this for being a fan. I think you will find it *may* be a violation of copyright - copyright holders are free to decide the terms of their license. They could say, for example, you must stand on one foot to license a copy for streaming. They can also, more likely to pass the court's smell test, say that you must reside within a certain area to be eligible for x-license. They would easily be within their rights and the thing is, well, the laws of their country do not apply - the laws of the ri
Nobody has a right to a market (Score:2)
So don't then. The customers don't need it. They can access it online.
We don't outlaw bread making machines in order to keep bakers in business either.
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There is a difference. Content is consumed for the "informational" content it has, while bread is bought to eat its substance. While I think a 25 year limit after creator death is a good copyright term, the content creators still need something they can live off. You don't need to block geoblock-circumvention services for that I think.
Re:Nobody has a right to a market (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no such thing as "a certain audience"..
If you operate a movie theatre, you can't check passports on the door and only allow citizens of a specific country to enter.
You can't stop someone sending physical media across borders, although the north koreans keep trying.
Refusing to sell content to someone based on their location or nationality should be illegal as it's discrimination. Similarly, trying to carve the world up into arbitrary areas so you can enforce exclusive distributors in each area is anti-competitive and should also be illegal.
If you want to charge someone to view your content, then you should do so in a non discriminatory way - ie anyone can view it and for the same price (external factors like taxes, shipping costs notwithstanding). Anything else should be illegal.
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If you operate a movie theatre, you can't check passports on the door and only allow citizens of a specific country to enter.
True, but you can be pretty certain that someone coming in to your movie theater is physically located in your country. It's also a reasonable assumption that it's legal for them to be there.
You can't stop someone sending physical media across borders, although the north koreans keep trying.
Maybe you can't achieve perfect enforcement, but I would guess that every country in the world has laws about what physical items can be brought into or sent out from that country.
Refusing to sell content to someone based on their location or nationality should be illegal as it's discrimination. Similarly, trying to carve the world up into arbitrary areas so you can enforce exclusive distributors in each area is anti-competitive and should also be illegal.
I agree that that's a great ideal. The problem is, under who's jurisdiction? For example, the United States has very little control over what
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If you want to subsidise students, give them money directly, don't give them discounts on services they may or may not use.
It's not a subside, it's pricing discrimination. Price discrimination is used to increase profits. In this case, more students will go see the movie, because they get a lower price. Non-students are less price sensitive and will go anyway at the higher price. Price discrimination is the "free hand" ripping you off, because it is not an efficient market, but an exploitative one.
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I think the main problem movie studios face is sheer logistics. Its not evil-dom, and perhaps only a small grain of it. Think about it: you have produced a movie, and don't know how successful it will be. Do you want to manufacture millions of DVDs in vain, or only tens of thousands? These are all costs you have to bear, I guess. With every new movie being its own financial risk, its hard to release a movie world-wide without cost problems. Next are the cinemas. I guess the australian cinema companies are q
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I don't entirely disagree, but the practice of regionalising distribution is an attempt by the publisher to have its cake and eat it too.
When they film a TV show, or create a tangible product, in one place, exploiting local price differentials to keep production costs down, then selling at a different price in every region, to maximise their profit, they are explicitly denying their customers the same choice that they themselves made during production.
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The publisher knows full well that some people will be using Netflix US through VPN or DNS spoofing services, and that this represents an increased value fro the company so will charge according
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Arrogant? Yes.
Especially with Rugby Union - we have both championships tied up:
World's Worst Losers & World's Worst Winners.
Go Black!
Southern Cross Cable (Score:2)
Pity we don't have a court judgement to point to (Score:3)
If I travel to the USA, buy a legal DVD, fly back to NZ and watch it here it is all legal. So how is that different from having my Internet connect travel to the USA, purchasing a media file and bringing it back to NZ to watch. Both cost time and money but offer more choice. Morally and/or legally is there any difference?
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The license it for your use. In the first case, bringing the DVD back, it might actually be in violation of the license you have with the media company. Will they prosecute it? Not for one disc. Try bringing back 10,000 and see what happens. I do not agree with this but, well, you know the routine...
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They might be considered pirated if they have some sort of mention about only being authorized for use in the United States or similar. They are pretty sneaky bastards. I do not agree with them, at all, but was rather pointing to the legal potentials. I also suspect that US law would apply and NZ would happily comply.
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Then no, it probably is not illegal. Else I am guessing the powers that be would have come knocking them down.