Global mode over ? Lets see.....

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67 posts

Master Geek

#1276496 2-Apr-2015 23:11

Aredwood:

What about everyone who travels overseas for holidays / business? Alot of them will take with them a laptop that has a legal copy of windows. And an ipod or iphone that has songs that were purchased from the NZ itunes store. Going by your logic these people are violating NZ copyright by using their laptops. And listening to their music while overseas.

So lets say I decide to travel the world, and I take my laptop with me. Are you saying that I should buy a Windows licence for every country that I visit? So If I visit 10 countries, I would need 10 Windows licences for just 1 laptop? But Microsoft don't care about this. They have already sold me a genuine copy of Windows. They know that making it harder to buy genuine copies of their software will just mean more piracy and less sales.

And Netflix don't care either. As regardless of which country I get Netflix from. The copyright owner still gets paid. Assuming that the contract with the copyright owner is a payment per user or payment per view.

And taking the arguments in the legal threats to their logical conclusion. This would mean that there would be no point in paying for content from overseas. As it would be just as bad as torrenting it. So you might as well just torrent it then. And everyone who buys books, DVDs ect from overseas. If you can't get it locally then you are no worse off from torrenting it. And it would mean that overseas shopping sites will then be breaking NZ law by shipping books ect to nz.

Regarding Windows? As far as I know Microsofts End User License Agreement doesn't care where in the world your laptop is as long as its not in one of the countries the United States does not like. So you're free to travel the world with your windows laptop as long as only one user is using your laptop at a time and that user isn't disassembling windows other doing all the other things the EULA forbids while you're traveling.

Remember - you don't own the copy of windows, you just licensed it. Microsoft sets the terms of the license and they can include whatever terms they like until their copyrights expire and it becomes public domain. This is how copyright works. If Microsoft said you need to get a new license for every country you visit it would be their right to do so but they probably wouldn't like the PR.

Movies/TV/Music/books are under the same law and so work largely in the same way (there are in some countries various exceptions for things - for example being allowed to record parodies without permission (still have to pay royalties), etc). Copyright holder decides what you can and cannot do.

As for Netflix, I'd say they do care to an extent. If they are seen to be breaking their contracts they might find it hard to renew them or license more content in the future. They have said they'd rather the whole geographical restrictions thing just went away though. I think its really just the studios trying to squeeze money out of people without realising they're just shooting themselves in the foot. Same goes for DRM - for some reason I can't comprehend everyone keeps spending vast sums of money trying to implement something that is technically impossible. I get the feeling the people running the studios don't pay much attention to the real world. That or they're malevolent. Their constant attempts to change the law suggests the later but I'd rather believe they're just incompetent.

Anyway, even if using American Netflix is legally equivalent to bittorrenting everything I'd say it is at least morally different. After all you are at least trying to pay for the content - its just in a way that the copyright holder doesn't want to be paid

Aredwood

3885 posts

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#1276523 2-Apr-2015 23:49

davidrg:

Anyway, even if using American Netflix is legally equivalent to bittorrenting everything I'd say it is at least morally different. After all you are at least trying to pay for the content - its just in a way that the copyright holder doesn't want to be paid

I can't see how it could be any better from a moral perspective. Paying money to do something that is illegal is no better than doing something that doesn't cost money but is still illegal. Is paying money for access to a private torrent tracker any better morally than using a free one? Of course not.

The question that needs to be asked - If someone could wave a magic wand and suddenly make it completely impossible to bypass all kinds of geoblocking. What % of people who currently access geoblocked services, will instead just turn to torrenting? My pick is that that % will be enough. That overall overseas content owners make the most money as it is. As extra viewers mean that copyright owners get more royalties. Yet they are also trying to balance total number of viewers / licences sold. Vs income from selling country rights / different prices in different countries. And if the streaming service has adds. Then the service provider can charge more for advertising. Again due to more viewers.

macuser

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#1276530 3-Apr-2015 00:17

So many dumb replies, from posters who are 'not a lawyer'

Parallel importing content is legal for consumers and has been for years.

CallPlus does not sell you the content, it just enables you to receive it (like a mail carrier).

CallPlus advertises this feature as it is valuable to customers, just like Youshop is advertised by NZ Post.

The consumer is breaking the terms and conditions of Netflix by using a DNS service to change the region of content it is viewing, which is not illegal, it just means the consumer is breaking terms and conditions and could be liable to have its service suspended, this has nothing to do with CallPlus - it is a relationship between Netflix and the consumer.

If you don't like that, then contact your local MP and suggest they change the law, just be prepared to lose the ability to import everything else you like because local dealers think that you're effecting their business.

richms

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#1276533 3-Apr-2015 00:45

So where do you draw the line in this list of things?

Its legal for me to lend you a DVD I own.

so is it ok for me to lend you a DVD and the drive that it goes in, incase you dont have one?

Is it ok to let you come to my place and plug your PC into that dvd drive and watch the content?

Is it ok for me to let you not have to drive to my place, and instead connect to that dvd drive over the internet to watch that content?

Richard rich.ms

mattwnz

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#1276541 3-Apr-2015 00:53

freitasm:

All very good but books and DVDs are also copyrighted material and we can easily buy those on Amazon and have these directly shipped here.

I can buy a book cheaper on Amazon, including shipping, than from Whitcoulls on Lambton Quay. Whitcoulls can complain all they want but it is still my right to import that for personal use. Similar concept.

Thinbgs are quickly changing with the drop in the NZ dollar compared to teh US dollar. I am finding less people are buying things from overseas. Some things are now cheaper locally. For example I was looking for a new kindle for a family memeber, and you can buy a kindle a lot cheaper locally from Dick Smiths, than Amazon at the moment. Its well over 2 hundred for the paperwhite, but locally in Dick Smiths, I picked the same one up for $160 with CGA protection. These things do go in cycles.

khull

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#1276549 3-Apr-2015 01:05

mattwnz:
freitasm:

All very good but books and DVDs are also copyrighted material and we can easily buy those on Amazon and have these directly shipped here.

I can buy a book cheaper on Amazon, including shipping, than from Whitcoulls on Lambton Quay. Whitcoulls can complain all they want but it is still my right to import that for personal use. Similar concept.

Thinbgs are quickly changing with the drop in the NZ dollar compared to teh US dollar. I am finding less people are buying things from overseas. Some things are now cheaper locally. For example I was looking for a new kindle for a family memeber, and you can buy a kindle a lot cheaper locally from Dick Smiths, than Amazon at the moment. Its well over 2 hundred for the paperwhite, but locally in Dick Smiths, I picked the same one up for $160 with CGA protection. These things do go in cycles.

I think you were referring to the kindle voyage? There were two versions of paper whites released. Not sure which one DSE carries. maybe older?

There are means of cheaper shipping I.e. Friends/family members that is not via you shop, pretty confident even with tax slapped on top it will work out cheaper for now, perhaps not kindles

StarBlazer

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#1276552 3-Apr-2015 01:18

PottsyNZ: People seem to be thinking you can compare the idea of parallel importing to broadcasting rights. It's really not the same.

Lets put it this way by looking at it in reverse. TVNZ was able to make Go Girls because it was a to offset the cost by selling it to multiple regions and networks. Love or hate it the law means broadcasting rights are the right to show that in a particular country. Movies make most of their money in threatres...tv shows make most of their money by actually being broadcast on tv

The greedy corporates are just trying to enforce their right to be the only "broadcaster" in that region.
Blame law (and business models) written for VHF tv.

TVNZ have the right to on sell the broadcast rights to anyone they want, including Netfix. Why should Netfix have to pay for it 50 times for each region they operate in that doesn't make sense.

Netflix doesn't affect first layer distribution of broadcast TV, they only provide own content or older content. Global mode is a mechanism only to allow people to circumvent region blocking, no different to DVD players. Should we go after Stuff because the adverts that show up on Netflix stories often are for VPNs?

Let it play out in court, the lawyers will get richer, the businesses will poorer and it will become a problem for the government to legislate inadequately for. Then we can go back to the good old days of nobody streaming domestic material and getting everything through torrent or a mate down the pub and all the distributors crying foul!!!

Procrastination eventually pays off.

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dclegg

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#1276595 3-Apr-2015 08:19

Aredwood:
davidrg:

Anyway, even if using American Netflix is legally equivalent to bittorrenting everything I'd say it is at least morally different. After all you are at least trying to pay for the content - its just in a way that the copyright holder doesn't want to be paid

I can't see how it could be any better from a moral perspective. Paying money to do something that is illegal is no better than doing something that doesn't cost money but is still illegal. Is paying money for access to a private torrent tracker any better morally than using a free one? Of course not.

By subscribing to a legal service like NetFlix rather than torrenting my content, the content creators are getting paid. They may not be getting paid at the rate they normally would (due to fluctuating costs of license agreements around the world), but they are still getting paid. That is why I personally have no moral issue with parallel importing content, yet I am morally opposed to torrenting it.

NonprayingMantis

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#1276610 3-Apr-2015 09:12

dclegg:
Aredwood:
davidrg:

Anyway, even if using American Netflix is legally equivalent to bittorrenting everything I'd say it is at least morally different. After all you are at least trying to pay for the content - its just in a way that the copyright holder doesn't want to be paid

I can't see how it could be any better from a moral perspective. Paying money to do something that is illegal is no better than doing something that doesn't cost money but is still illegal. Is paying money for access to a private torrent tracker any better morally than using a free one? Of course not.

By subscribing to a legal service like NetFlix rather than torrenting my content, the content creators are getting paid. They may not be getting paid at the rate they normally would (due to fluctuating costs of license agreements around the world), but they are still getting paid. That is why I personally have no moral issue with parallel importing content, yet I am morally opposed to torrenting it.

they actually aren't. Netflix licences its content on a flat fee per region, so you subscribing to usa netflix gives the content creators nothing extra. It's just pure profit for netflix.

freitasm

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#1276612 3-Apr-2015 09:19

davidrg: Anyway, even if using American Netflix is legally equivalent to bittorrenting everything I'd say it is at least morally different. After all you are at least trying to pay for the content - its just in a way that the copyright holder doesn't want to be paid

And that's the whole point. using a geo-blocked service is not legally or technically equivalent to torrenting. The company offering the content has the rights to offer it. The person watching the content is not redistributing it.

The person watching the content is parallel importing it, which in New Zealand is perfectly legal.

At worst there's a breach of T&Cs. Should the distributing company block it? Sure, but we know it's almost impossible to do it with VPNs, etc.

shk292

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#1276613 3-Apr-2015 09:19

NonprayingMantis: they actually aren't. Netflix licences its content on a flat fee per region, so you subscribing to usa netflix gives the content creators nothing extra. It's just pure profit for netflix.

But surely, the studios have a business model where the number of subscribers to a streaming service has an influence on the licencing cost to that service? Otherwise, it would be impossible to start up a service - if the studios assumed you'd eventually have a subscriber base of say 40 million in the US, and charged you accordingly. I would have thought that the charges are based on an original estimate of audience, which is then periodically audited and updated. I find it very hard to believe that streaming services pay a flat, fixed for years, regional rate for content regardless of whether they have 10k or 10M users. So in this way, by subscribing to US netflix a NZ user is contributing to the studio income in exactly the same way as a new US user

freitasm

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#1276614 3-Apr-2015 09:22

The conspiracy theorist cells in me tell me the studios booked a hotel room in Auckland, but the execs for this firm there and said "You won't be allowed to leave this room until you put pressure against VPN users."

In another universe they'd have said "You won't be allowed more licenses to content until you put pressure against VPN users."

Or something like that.

dclegg

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#1276615 3-Apr-2015 09:22

NonprayingMantis:
dclegg:

By subscribing to a legal service like NetFlix rather than torrenting my content, the content creators are getting paid. They may not be getting paid at the rate they normally would (due to fluctuating costs of license agreements around the world), but they are still getting paid. That is why I personally have no moral issue with parallel importing content, yet I am morally opposed to torrenting it.

they actually aren't. Netflix licences its content on a flat fee per region, so you subscribing to usa netflix gives the content creators nothing extra. It's just pure profit for netflix.

By being a paying Netflix customer (regardless of region), I'm helping Netflix to pay the the content creators (or help to bankroll their own content). If I torrent, I'm not paying anyone. This is why I have no moral qualms about parallel importing content, but I do have them about torrenting it.

A possible solution here is for content creators to abandon this flat fee, and instead charge Netflix on a per-user basis.

shk292

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#1276616 3-Apr-2015 09:23

davidrg:
shk292:
You seem to have (deliberately?) missed one thing: when I stream from Netflix, at no point do I possess a copy of the movie I am watching. No additional copy has been made, in the same way as if I tune my radio into a BBC channel while I'm in France, I have not made a copy of the music I'm hearing and am not breaching copyright.

If I torrent, on the other hand, not only do I make and possess a copy of the material, I also offer this to others so they can do the same. This is such a completely different concept, I can only think that those who are trying to confuse the two are either very stupid or willfully ignorant.

I ignored that because it seemed unnecessary to state. If no copying happened you wouldn't have the video frames in your computers memory for the video player to decompress and display would you? Those frames were in one place and now they're in two. Seems reasonable to say they were copied to your computer in some way. Probably lots of frames too considering buffering, etc.

Protocol doesn't matter. If I upload one of my blu-rays to my web server and you streamed it from there it wouldn't be legal even if you discarded each frame after it was played. Because I didn't have a license to send it and you didn't have a license to watch it. Only difference between HTTP and bittorent here is bittorrent forces you to store a copy on disk due to its out-of-order transmission. Bittorrent doesn't require you to offer the data you receive to your peers so that part is irrelevant.

To do something with a copyrighted work you need a license. Doesn't matter if a copy is being stored on a hard disk or displayed as each frame is received. I need a license to send it and you need a license to receive it.

Regarding DVDs, the disc is sold but the content is licensed. You'll probably find that the license says you're not allowed to copy the content of the disc, screen it at work, rent it out to other people or do any of a number of other things with it. No one seems to dispute this. Why would limiting sale across borders be any different? Its not so much more draconian than the restrictions sometimes placed on software (which can also come on a disc) and people accept those (or don't read the license agreement to see they're there). I guess the copyright holders either just don't restrict resale of DVDs across borders or don't bother enforcing any restrictions they have.

Perhaps the problem is certain copyright groups have conflated copyrights and patents with property. These things are of course not property. Copying a DVD is not technically or legally speaking Theft (its Copyright Infringement). You won't find copying a DVD in the crimes act under Piratical acts. Copyright is nothing more than a temporary right granted by the public to someone to restrict copying in whatever way the holder sees fit for a limited period of time. And the copyright holder would be within their rights to say "No sending this data to New Zealand under any circumstances" just as they are to say "No sending this data anywhere".

Of course the Government could limit the copyright holders rights and say "You're not allowed to prevent people ripping DVDs they own" but as far as I know there aren't any such exceptions for streaming content via a VPN.

You're still trying to equate two different things. When I stream, I never have an entire copy of the streamed content in my possession. When I torrent, I do - I have created a perfect copy that I can redistribute, archive, and watch whenever I want. If this is no different, why do all the streaming services go to great lengths to ensure you can't store local copies of the streamed content? I'm no more copying the content by buffering frames than I am copying a radio broadcast by buffering an IF signal in an amplifier.

It may be convenient for your/VF/Sky's argument to say that geo-unblocking streaming is copying, piracy or illegal, and the same as torrenting. But it doesn't make it true.

NonprayingMantis

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#1276623 3-Apr-2015 09:38

shk292:
NonprayingMantis: they actually aren't. Netflix licences its content on a flat fee per region, so you subscribing to usa netflix gives the content creators nothing extra. It's just pure profit for netflix.

But surely, the studios have a business model where the number of subscribers to a streaming service has an influence on the licencing cost to that service? Otherwise, it would be impossible to start up a service - if the studios assumed you'd eventually have a subscriber base of say 40 million in the US, and charged you accordingly. I would have thought that the charges are based on an original estimate of audience, which is then periodically audited and updated. I find it very hard to believe that streaming services pay a flat, fixed for years, regional rate for content regardless of whether they have 10k or 10M users. So in this way, by subscribing to US netflix a NZ user is contributing to the studio income in exactly the same way as a new US user

If that were true, then there would be loads and loads of small startups streaming specific premium content because they only have to pay small amounts of money for it.

Instead, we have something like lightbox, who had to spend $30m or something in the first year on content, before it had any customers at all.

So no, the fees don't work based on volume for svod. For tvod (itunes style) they do pay per stream, which is why the cost of using that service is so high.

However, they do work based on the size of the region you are selling in, and how much the studios think they can squeeze from you. So, for example, buying the rights to madmen in the USA is going to cost a lot more than buying the same rights for NZ.

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