Therefore I had a Netflix USA account, which I accessed via unblock-us. The clampdown by Netflix has been "successful" and I now can't access Netflix USA using unblock-us.

This happened halfway through watching House of Cards. So my choice was either stop watching or download the remaining episodes...

I am tired of companies talking about borderless trade, global economy, etc. when the distribution of movies and tv shows is stuck in the sad world of geo-restrictions. I also legally get access to UK TV channels through my cable subscription, but I don't get access to iPlayer as that's only for UK residents... so again the only option to catch-up on TV that I forgot to record, is to use an unblocker.

    - I had to wait 25 minutes for the activation email
    - I activated my account, but it wouldn’t let me access my account settings for another 25 minutes
    - then I had to install Silverlight (I’m on OS X)
    - then I tried to start the stream, which resulted in an OS freeze and something like the OS X blue screen, which I have never seen ever before
    - then I rebooted and tried again, which failed with the *authentication* step
    - the web inspector showed a bunch of JS and/or Silverlight errors
    - I gave up and installed Silverlight on my wife’s Win 10 machine
    - the stream would load, but it has hard-coded German subtitles for signs and Dothraki scenes, which is annoying.
    - it has no optional English subtitles
    - it is only HD, not Full HD
    - stream was kind of laggy

    - downloads very fast
    - usually there are subtitles
    - superb quality
    - I can watch whenever I want with the player I want
    - no browser plugins, no errors, no nothing.
    - it just works

It's not too hard to slap a PayPal or Stripe button in front of an HTML5 video with optional Flash fallback. But no, legal entities need to make sure that you won't rip them off with their digital rights nonsense.

I understand that this is mostly a legal requirement, but the technical implementation still sucks tremendously up to a point where I wonder, why a service that charges money can't afford better developers than a free service.

Also: It's not that piracy is without hassles. The piracy-process could easily be outperformed by making it as simple as payment button in front of a media player or downloadable file.

Because when I want to download GoT as a torrent, I have to install a BitTorrent client, I have to go find the torrent files, I must look at ads for porn sites, I often must find the right download button in spammy-looking sites, I need to distinguish which file I actually want and see if it's a fake or not.

The piracy process is difficult enough for most people, but it's still so much easier than the process of watching the show legally.

I simply can't wrap my head around this.

So I turned my NAS back on and cancelled my subscription.

I'm happy paying content providers, I really am. I visit the cinema, buy DVDs and even songs on iTunes. But if you stop me or hinder me to the point where piracy is a significantly easier option (Or only one illegal option when there are only illegal options) then I'm going to do it.

(This is slightly annoying however because there is a rather large "netflix" button on my new TV remote.)

One often-overlooked point is soundtracks. This is why there's no official Cold Case DVD/BD set - it would be prohibitively expensive to license all the music for distribution outside of TV.

Media Rights Capital "owns" House of Cards, Netflix distributes the show. Even then MRC's rights are probably limited because they bought the rights to the concept from the BBC who originally did House of Cards as a mini-series.

Yeah, that's probably what they're doing. It wouldn't be too hard for them to get the first 95% either - beyond ARIN/NIC registration searches etc, they could just look for IP addresses that often have a large number of subscribers behind them, especially a large number of non-us subscribers.

A normally configured proxy and VPN usually end up with a flagged IP, as I've read multiple reports of people trying with DO or Amazon EC2 nodes.

You had the choice to stop watching... and thats the only legal choice. To pretend that doing something illegal because you feel entitled to it is right, thats a little bit... childish?

Its simple entitlement. Don't try to confuse the issue by making it about some kind of discriminatory issue. A business has to have licences to operate in a country, there are many stipulations and there is a cost involved with those stipulations, netflix has no oblication to jump through legal hurdles and pay more money so everyone can enjoy their content.

I work for a global company - one who works in the digital realm and makes AAA games... trust me, I deal with these things. You'd be surprised the effort for a US company to sell their product/service in china...

But this only means that international law is a mess, and have to be repealed/updated. It won't happen soon, unless there will be more and more people willingfully breaking the law, as they are damn right to feel "entitled" to equal service, which can be delivered by config option. Technically, it is not a big deal. If it is a huge legal deal, the laws be damned.

Man, i didnt realize they HAD to copy them... i swear they have the option to just not watch.

Oh, but again, they feel entitled to watch.

I bet people like Rosa Parks, MLK, etc... people who paid dearly for Equal rights would be so upset that you've lowered the meaning of that word to simple movies...

Being treated differently, being cast aside and being held back from success because of your race, that you cant change, that you had no control of aquiring - is nowhere near not being able to watch a movie because of legal restrictions of where you live. How do you possibly consider those things even remotely similar?

In fact, there were sit-ins in "white only" movie theaters, because some people weren't accepted here even if they were able to pay. It's not that they didn't have the option to just not watch the movie, right?

Back then, white people were responding to just accusations exactly the same way — "come on, it's _just_ the bus ride! it's just the movie! what's the big deal?"

I can't easily come to live where I want — visa issues. This is discrimination by nationality, exactly the same as discrimination by skin color. And part of this big discrimination is my inability to watch the movie based on the place where I live.

Edited that for clarity.

For example, must the price to stream the latest James Bond movie be the same in India as the United States?

Pragmatically, though, it is not a big deal. Here in Switzerland, I am content to pay 2x price for the same content as in the US — we have to support our reputation as the most expensive country on Earth, after all :) In India, one can attempt to sell software and content for the same price as in US, but it won't generate any sales. The pragmatic option is to sell Indian-localized software for low price, and English versions for original price, which is already working perfectly well for software and everyone is happy. Both me and an Indian girl can buy any US-made software. At least it was possible when the software was downloaded or delivered physically — software in app stores are becoming subject to the same shitty policies as the rest of digital content.

The world is becoming increasingly global, but policymakers and copyright holders try to isolate us in nation state borders.

Technically, if you own a restaurant, you can refuse to serve anyone, they are not entitled to your food and service. But try to selectively refuse service to African Americans, or gays, or Canadians, or Swiss, or all non-Americans, and see where this road will lead you and how much time you'll get until first lawsuit.

If history is any teacher, it is impossible to fight immoral discriminatory laws legally. Peaceful protest works much better. So, go pirate, history and truth are on our side.

>Its simple entitlement

>they feel entitled to watch

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

>why do you feel entitled to consume content that you didn't create, in the first place?

Because it has been published, therefore it is public. 'Publish' is literally a verb that means 'to make available to the public'. And 'public' is literally an adjective that means 'open to or shared by all people'. Of course people have a right to access public things. Why would you feel otherwise? Do you feel guilty when you go to a public park because you didn't create the land? Do you feel the urge to surrender yourself to the police because you walked on a public sidewalk that you didn't create?

Copyright grants special privileges to an author so that they can be compensated for their work, in hopes that this will encourage people to publish things. If you refuse to use your privileges, that's your choice, you decided not to get paid. The public is still entitled to keep the gift that you gave them.

Where it gets ugly is that copyright declares that copying or transmitting something (even something already public) is itself an act of publication, and only the author is allowed to determine who may republish their work for awhile. So redistributing without permission is not allowed. But it has been published and therefore the public does still have a right to access it if it is available, they just don't have the right to republish it.

Which leads to the issue here. What is the correct result if something is public, and the public has every right to access it, but can't exercise that right because it's not available? In theory, the author should take advantage of their copyright privileges to get some money from the public in exchange for access. That would be a win-win, leaving everybody happy!

In the past, that could be difficult due to printing and shipping and international trade difficulties and various other legitimate problems. But today's tech makes it relatively trivial, cheap, and convenient to sell digital files online globally. So if the author chooses not to do so, then in the eyes of the public, the author has opted out of their copyright privilege, they have forfeited. It is a public thing that should be open to free access, since the author has chosen not to accept payment for access. Of course, that's not what the law says yet, but that's already what people believe is correct, reasonable, and ethical.

Authors who attempt to suppress access to public things, or make it unreasonably difficult and expensive to do so, or bully people who try to access them, are in the wrong, and they will lose eventually. That is an unethical and immoral stance, and it is an abuse of copyright, not in keeping with its intent.

We've turned to Kodi. We don't want to pirate, but it's hard to make a compelling argument against it when you get everything you want even easier than torrents.

Add to that the abusive monopolies of Shaw and Bell, who each now have their own streaming subscriptions, services like Hulu and HBO Now either being blocked here or controlled by Shaw or Bell, and the Netlix subscription increasing by 50% in May for a lacklustre catalogue.

With all of that, the three movies I go to the cinema to see each month, and my Netflix subscription, it's hard not to feel like I pay my share for content. Not a popular opinion, I'm sure, but I'm not getting a dozen streaming services subscriptions.

I also hate the things Bell has tried to do through the CRTC, like that whole Internet thing with smaller providers using its pipes.

I guess it's a principal thing.

EDIT: Another example... I used to always choose Famous Players for movies. I avoided Cineplex. Then Cplex gobbled up Famous and I started going to Landmark. I should be able to choose where I consume my content.

(Spoiler: the unbundled packages cost more and have fewer shows)

Media companies need to grow up.

This question is the very heart of network neutrality. You don't want your cable company running a competing streaming service.

Really, you don't.

Not being able to stream to my TV kind of defeats the point for me.

After years of not being able to legally access some copyrighted content, with no discussion and no change, I honestly don't see the copyright holders backing down - strange considering that they are the only ones actually losing out. Nobody deserves to have their hard work stolen, but I can't lie and deny that I don't perceive some form of justice happening here.

Instead, what production companies try to optimize is the funding used to create the content in the first place. They sell the rights as many times as they can, in as many different markets as they can, in order to finance the production. They are then required to enforce region restrictions to live up to the foreign distribution contracts they signed.

The fact that this ultimately results in lower profits hasn't yet occurred to these idiots^H^H^H^H^H^H creative geniuses. It brings in more cash up front, which appears to be all they care about.

One day it'll be more profitable to do a more reasonable distribution method and that day they'll switch pretending they wanted to do it the entire time. The whole HBO streaming thing is likely a good example of this.

This seems like a good thing for a business to do, although perhaps they should figure out better ways to do this so they don't anger all their consumers

First off, it's not theft, it's copyright infringement. No one's stealing their content, because the copyright holders still have it. Stealing is wrong because it deprives the owner of the use of that thing: if I steal your car, then you can't drive to work any more. If I sneakily scan your car with a tricorder and 3D-print a clone of it, you still have your car.

Semantics aside, I completely disagree about them deserving to have their hard work copied and not getting paid for it. They absolutely do deserve this. If someone works hard on some piece of art (music, movie, etc.) and makes it conveniently available to everyone at the same fair price, then I think they deserve to get paid for it. But if they're dicks and they use their dominant position and inertia to promote their works and make them popular and culturally relevant, but then they only make them available to some people and not to others because they're trying to figure out unethical ways of gaming the system to make more money, then fuck 'em. People in other regions where this stuff isn't available have every right to copy it without paying.

These copyright holders have been bitching for many years about "piracy". Then along came the iTunes Store, Netflix, etc., and they proved that people are willing to pay for this stuff as long as it's a fair price and is convenient. Now they want to dick with it, so predictably, people are going back to piracy. Personally, I'd rather not bother with piracy: it's a PITA to use BitTorrent, try to find good versions of stuff, hope there's enough seeders out there, wait forever for it to download (not a problem if it's extremely popular that day, but a big problem if it's not), etc. I'd much rather pay $8/month for Netflix and just select what I want to see, hit "play" and watch it. But if the copyright holders are going to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, then oh well...

I think you've got this wrong. The people in other regions don't have "every right to copy it", they have "every right to not consume it". Don't like the rules? Don't play. It's their content, so they set the rules. That's kind of all there is to it. I absolutely agree that you can be pissed off about this and not like it though.

But nothing gives you the "right" to force your way into someone else's party just because you weren't invited, or didn't like the ticket price. If you think like that, you're as much of a dick as the people you seem to be mad at.

So unless you are using the word "unethical" in an ironic fashion when you describe what they do, you probably should not use it at all if you're then going to condone what is essentially an unethical response yourself.

>But nothing gives you the "right" to force your way into someone else's party just because you weren't invited, or didn't like the ticket price.

Completely wrong on both counts.

If I'm not invited to someone else's party, but I want to observe it without interfering with the partygoers, I have every right to invent a device which allows me to create an artificial wormhole which then allows me to remotely observe this party (see the Arthur C. Clarke book "Light of Other Days"). The partygoers will have no idea I'm observing them and since they wouldn't sell me a ticket anyway, they won't see a difference in their revenues.

Similarly, if content holders don't bother to offer their wares to me and then make it too difficult for me to acquire them with a workaround (subscription + VPN), then I have every right to download a copy. As above, they have no idea that I'm watching their content, and since they didn't offer it to me for sale anyway, they won't see a difference in their revenues.

>if you're then going to condone what is essentially an unethical response yourself.

I'm not condoning an unethical response, I'm condoning an ethical one. Ethics are in the eye of the beholder; for some people, it's completely ethical to hack someone's head off if they don't follow the correct religion. I choose to reject your system of ethics which grants all power to large, moneyed interests.

Voyeurism may or may not be a crime in your jurisdiction.

Here's another thought experiment, but using modern tech: suppose there's a party like this (open to the public, tickets required to enter), and there's no rules at the club forbidding cameras or communication devices. If you pay the ticket price, you're allowed to enter and take photos all you want as long as you don't disturb people and make a nuisance of yourself. (I'm pretty sure any normal bar or club these days is just like this; people take photos of themselves at bars all the time.)

You don't want to pay the ticket price to get in, but you want to see what's going on there. Your friend however wants to go in, so he buys a ticket and enters. While inside, he whips out his phone, and activates an app which contacts your phone, and then streams live video from his phone's camera to your phone. You're now able to see and hear what's going on in the party without buying a ticket, apparently legally. Fast-forward a few years and instead of watching your buddy's video stream on your 5" phone screen, you're watching it on a VR headset, so it's almost like being there. My wormhole idea isn't much different from this; it just doesn't require a confederate.

And it will do whatever it takes to satisfy this demand. If this happens to be "subscribing to your awesome streaming service", well then good for you! If not, too bad, the market DOES NOT CARE about you.

So you can now either spend your money on lobbying to get these people into jail or try to expand your market and get the people's money into your pockets. The latter being obviously the better choice for both you and your future customers.

The only place I know where I can reliably find copies of high-quality cinema is a private torrent tracker... and some public libraries, but I don't own a DVD unit (and don't want one).

Sure, there might be some legal way to gain semi-convenient access to the library of cinematic culture, but I don't know about it. It's kind of tragic.

Like, people seriously claim Netflix as some sort of alternative to pirate copying... and I go into the Swedish Netflix and search for "Bergman" and get one result: Casablanca.

iTunes's selection is wider, but still, I search for "Tarkovsky" and there's zilch. "Ozu", nothing. "Renoir", nah. Oh, they do have one Murnau, the newly restored Nosferatu. No Eisenstein, Dreyer, or Godard. And so on.

Of course it's all because of copyright restrictions and maybe a lack of projected profits from these art films. That's exactly the point. Pirate copying is a way for people to share this material without being restricted by such tedious limitations.

Hopefully as the popularity of online streaming increases, new contracts will take online streaming into account more. There's no real reason to have regional restrictions online, but I'm sure they'll continue as long as the companies want to get more money

> "well, we only got the rights to broadcast on TV, so we can't stream the show online in this country".

Is horrendous. Because then you wind up with 10 different streaming services, all charging you the same (or more) as netflix.

While I broadly agree with you I don't buy this one point.

By restricting availability by region, publishers can (a) spread out their promotion costs & reduce risk exposure, and (b) charge more.

Wearing my techno-utopian hat, the first reason is bullshit that nees solving and the second reason is greed. Wearing my realist hat, both reasons are the way the world works and neither seems like it's going to change in short order as publishers hold a monopoly over content.

Does anyone know if Netflix delay release of their own content by region?

It's been "fixed" now though.

  > Hopefully as the popularity of online streaming increases, new contracts will take online streaming into account more. There's no real reason to have regional restrictions online, but I'm sure they'll continue as long as the companies want to get more money

> Hopefully as the popularity of onli

And can't scroll to see the rest.

Pirating content is the easiest, fastest, highest quality, and most available method of watching content. The price is just a nice bonus.

Digital restrictions hurt everyone and maybe one day Hollywood will wake up and realize that you can't strong-arm the market into behaving how you want it to and you have to adapt to consumer demand. It's one of the few industries that I know of that try this hard to fight against consumer demand. It's so backwards.

Until the day they change, pirate on.

Netflix launched globally without taking the time to negotiate content for most countries on earth. I'm not sure you can assume that Netflix is being diligent in trying to acquire content.

Especially since even in the USA netlix appears to be pivoting into being a content creator instead of a content aggregator.

The OP isn't talking about greedy German companies, he's complaining about greedy American companies who won't let Netflix in Germany show American content to German viewers. Greedy German companies are a different issue.

This whole issue is mainly about greedy American companies, because if there's one thing that America produces that people around the world want, it's our movies and TV, and a lot of people outside the US were/are using VPNs and other such things to get access to a US-based Netflix account because the versions in their own countries didn't have all the content that the American version has, and now Netflix is restricting that access.

There aren't many people outside Germany/Austria who really want to see content from German media companies.

Then they need to maintain this barrier so that the deal is good for both the Producer and Distributor involved. If they don't force Netflix to do this then the deals don't look as good to the distributors.

EDIT: And I say this as someone who spends roughly $100/month supporting artists I like on Patreon and Kickstarter, so I'm not opposed to paying for content. I'm just opposed to big media conglomerates screwing me.

Also, while it may not be Netflix's fault, it's definitely Netflix's problem. They are the ones losing out on free money.

I would love to pay someone for timely content, but now that Netflix is blocking vpn access there is literally nobody to pay. It's complete madness.

But 'House of Cards' is a Netflix production, and this doesn't apply here. They would have done themselfs a favour by not selling the rights to this content to the highest bidder. Especially since their ads suggest access to 'House of Cards'.

MRC licensed the name and concept from the BBC. That license would definitely not be regionalized.

But it appears there's an added wrinkle. Back when the show started production, MRC sold off rights in countries where Netflix didn't yet operate. CanalPlus in France and Sky Deutschland in Germany managed to get exclusive rights in their respective countries. Netflix is trying to get the rights globally, but they can't force anyone to sell them anything.

source: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/netflix-subscribers-eu...

It's far, far easier for me to pirate content than it is to legally buy it.

Until that's the case, I'm not interested in forking over my money to be inconvenienced (and this is coming from a dude who buys his music mainly on vinyl).

I'm Canadian, and I certainly don't back you up on this. I use Netflix, Crave, my providers VoD service, independent and mainstream theaters to consume content all the time. When I realize I've spent more then I should on entertainment, I simply find other stuff to do or consume.

Is it really about being "easier" and not about being cheap? Personally, I find it quite easy to swipe my credit card or link it to a Google Play account.

I am amazed to read this under the caption of articles picture: "Netflix customer Susan Lorenz of Toronto doesn't understand why the company is suddenly shutting her out from the content she used to be able to see." ... Susan most certainly understands why.

People pay taxes because they have to. When it comes to entertainment, people aren't going to waste their time jumping through hoops.

[0] http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114391-Valves-Gabe...

Gabe Newell's observation seems to me a very limited view of the world by a spectacularly successful first world entrepreneur.

People pirate games that are on steam by the millions. Fall out 4 was pirated millions of times, but it's super easy to install on Steam. In fact it's a pain in the butt to install a pirated copy. Yet it's highly pirated.

Paying for convenience is an upper middle class / rich thing. For a lot of people, saving 60 bucks is all the motivation one needs to pirate.

Hopefully the situation will change as the baby boomer generation dies off, and a younger generation that understands the idiocy of the previous era takes over. There is no way the current system would survive if 20-30 year olds were leading the industry. It's time to ditch the horse and carriage, and upgrade to electric vehicles.

The "right thing" and the "legal thing" are not always the same thing.

Later on in the article, it says this:

~~~~~

Because she pays for the service and has been able to skirt the rules for so long, Lorenz doesn't understand why Netflix is suddenly shutting her out.

"I don't know why I can't have international access," she says. "That doesn't make sense to me."

~~~~~

Understanding why there are content restrictions across regions makes no sense to most people.

Because the industry refuses to modernize the business structure they've been using since what, the 1950s? Before the birth of the internet. We have 18 year olds out there who grew up with internet as the centre of their world. It doesn't make sense to most people, because it doesn't make sense in the 21st century.

fix'd

If the content creator doesn't want to sell access to the content for you, then you have every right to access it through other means. They never had to cut off access to these non-US customers: they were paying good money for this service, the same money as someone in America. Why shouldn't they be allowed access? Why is their money not as good as an American's money?

Don't forget, we have a Free Trade treaty between Canada and the US. They're not practicing free trade here as the treaty states, so she has every right to work around it.

"If the content creator doesn't want to sell access to the content for you, then you have every right to access it through other means.", No you don't, how did you come up with this logic? No distributor deemed the selling price acceptable for them in Canada, if the creator wants the content in Canada he can sell it at a lower price. As a consumer, if you don't have an option to buy something, doesn't mean you should acquire it thru illegal means.

NAFTA was created to eliminate tariffs and protect intellectual property. Someone buys the right to distribute a show in Canada, this right should be protected.

She can buy the US version instead. Why should she be limited to what someone in Canada wants to sell it for? The internet doesn't follow national borders. I can access a webpage in Germany just as easily as a website in the US, and with online content, it's nothing more than bits being streamed. So why should she pay more? To prop up a dinosaur of a business model? Screw that.

>As a consumer, if you don't have an option to buy something, doesn't mean you should acquire it thru illegal means.

Sure it does. They've had their chance to offer things by legal means, they've been shown that it works, but it's not good enough for them. Fuck 'em.

>NAFTA was created to eliminate tariffs and protect intellectual property. Someone buys the right to distribute a show in Canada, this right should be protected.

Why should that be protected? That's not free trade, it's blatantly against the whole stated reason for the treaty.

Again, fuck 'em. Piracy is the answer. When legal means don't work, and only serve moneyed interests and are put in place by corrupt politicians, it's time to ignore the laws.

The article says "For about a year, Lorenz subscribed to Netflix Canada, but her family freely accessed the streaming service's shows from across the globe."

The change discussed is that a subscriber in one country is no longer allowed access to the catalog of another country when accessing from a proxy IP in that country. Whether she should be allowed set up and pay for a Netflix US account to watch US shows as a non-resident is a separate issue.

Make software that both turns your home computer into a single-user VPN server, that lets you set the maximum upload bandwidth to ~5mbit/s or so, and lets you only pass through Netflix content; and also gives you a VPN client that lets you connect to another's computer and only uses the VPN for Netflix content, allowing your web browser and everything else to continue working through your regular ISP. The whitelisting eliminates the traditional concern of someone using your connection for torrents or worse illegal content. The bandwidth limiting ensures smooth QoS for your own network. Latency here is not a concern at all ... it's streaming video.

Once you have this software, it's simply a matter of setting up a message forum somewhere where people say, "I am from 'country X' and want to watch content from 'country Y'", and waiting for someone in the reverse situation to come along. As long as your connections are always-on, this works perfectly.

As an alternative to the fact that more people will want US Netflix than any other region, people could also offer server-only access for nominal Paypal fees. Eg lease out a 5mbit/s link for $10/mo. The price would naturally follow supply and demand.

I can change my IP any time, and there is no possible way Netflix can ban my hostmask as a VPN (all of Time Warner Cable in Columbus, Ohio.)

And if this forces Netflix to start charging by billing region ... good!! Now we can offer services that let people pay for the regions they want to access! Or if they try and block that too, then perhaps people sharing VPNs can share their account logins next.

Either way, this is a cat-and-mouse game with a very clear end-game. Why the hell is no one working on this problem? There are millions of people affected by this VPN block nonsense.

On that note, I have a US 300/20 connection I'd be happy to share, and I can do the software the hard way with BSD/pf. Is there anyone with an always-on JP connection that would like to trade with me? I would also be willing to pay someone for a residential ISP VPN connection in Japan, which I would use exclusively for Netflix only. I'd really love to be able to use Netflix Japan again; it's helped a lot with my listening comprehension in studying the language.

(Side note: this proxy software wouldn't have to be just Netflix. It could be a wonderful anti-geolocking system. The major VPN and VPS models are clearly detectable and blockable. This could allow fine-grained whitelisting or blacklisting and decentralization of VPN services.)

Don't pay $10/mo to some random, don't pay $10/mo for HD netflix subscription.

Example: try finding the live action version of Nobunaga Concerto [信長協奏曲] (not the anime that's readily available.) Now I'm sure someone here can do it. But look at its seed ratio compared to say, Game of Thrones or Last Week Tonight. And this is a really easy case, because it's being streamed subtitled from Crunchyroll. Now imagine the difficulty of series not conveniently subtitled into English on major streaming services already.

The oddest thing for me are the constantly blocked Japanese music videos on Youtube. I'm not talking copyright infringing content, but music videos published on the official band/performer's channel and being viewable from within Japan only. Why is a music video blocked outside of Japan, when you can buy the song via the regional iTunes store? One would assume that a music video is meant to promote the music sales, so why are so many of them blocked outside of Japan then?

Yeah, they have a drama-only section that even then is 80% Korean (nothing wrong with that, just I'm not personally studying Korean.) And no option to turn off the English subtitles unless I want to watch movies on my computer instead of my TV. And absolutely, definitely, 100% never any offer for Japanese subtitles (closed captioning.) Very, very rare even on Netflix Japan, but it helps so much when I can find them.

> The oddest thing for me are the constantly blocked Japanese music videos on Youtube.

Yeah ... I don't understand that at all. Of all the countries, Japan seems to have the most obscenely strict copyright takedown enforcements of all. I pretty much always have to resort to torrents to obtain songs even remotely popular.

Japan really is a country that's stuck in the '90s. No surprise that also includes their views on music.

> Why is a music video blocked outside of Japan, when you can buy the song via the regional iTunes store?

I'm surprised they even let you buy it on iTunes. Apple must be forcing their hand somehow.

I've always dealt with extreme aversion to selling to me. The Japanese famously hate selling their wares internationally. It's pretty much a given that anything on Yahoo! Japan will be from sellers that refuse to ship internationally, so you have to use deputy services and pay them an extra 30% markup (plus a predatory and unfair yen exchange rate that's off by 15+ yen from the real market value.) And even then, there are sellers that track deputy IDs and will delete deputy bids. I've even come across one such seller, and my deputy of choice used one of their 'hidden' IDs to pick it up anyway. They're so used to it that they already had sleeper accounts for dealing with such sellers, despite having 100% perfect payment histories to sellers.

There are several major doujinshi websites for buying from artists, and these sites are 100% perfectly capable of accepting Visa cards from anywhere in the world ("it's everywhere you want to be... unless you want to be in Japan"), yet they block you anyway.

It was only just very recently that Amazon finally started selling new Japanese games internationally. Before then, I was paying 50% markups to small, sleazy extortionist companies. On top of having to buy Japanese systems to get around their region blocking attempts. Half surprised the fuckers don't try to use GPS to pinpoint you're not actually in Japan while playing their precious games.

Apologies if I seem bitter... it's because I am. I probably wasted $2000 on deputy fees alone trying to build a game collection and buy other items I like. And the harder I try to practice and learn this language, the more I get taken for a ride.

A) Tally up all the Account <-> IP relationships. B) Perform an analysis on # of accounts per IP that exceed predefined thresholds. C) Scrutinize accounts who are using an IP that is swarming with accounts from other countries.

Total cat and mouse, but can be automated quite easily.

In my scenario, it would be two accounts with two IPs each.

That threshold is way below something truly actionable. I mean, could you imagine? A guy travels and uses hotel wi-fi, perhaps internationally. Now he has two IPs associated with his account, and so they block/ban him. Not going to happen.

Hell, locally one's IP often changes thanks to DHCP leases expiring.

> C) Scrutinize accounts who are using an IP that is swarming with accounts from other countries.

This won't scale, and that's entirely the point. They catch ExpressVPN and co because there are 500+ accounts from each of the pool of ~20 IP addresses they have. They probably just block the whole subnet mask. VPS is the same, "this is a datacenter IP range. No customer is running out of a datacenter, it must be being used as a VPN."

But a guy's home connection of 50/20 mbit/s can only handle two users, and can't be flagged as belonging to a datacenter, and can't be range-blocked. I'm sure there will be cases of a person wanting access to 10+ regions, but for the most part, people just want one extra region. In my case, Japan. In most people's cases, the US.

And even the paid one way option ... there's also too many people on Hola sharing the same endpoints, and the threshold is high enough that many people are reporting that Hola is getting blocked as well.

The ratio needs to be 1:1. And if Netflix manages to block a user connecting from only two residential IP addresses, then the final step in this game is those two people will share their logins with each other. I connect to a Japan exit point, and use that person's Japanese account login; and vice versa. At that point, there is nothing left that Netflix can possibly do to stop me.

Not saying I agree with geo restrictions, or any of the other silliness (I don't, and thankfully we're rapidly moving away from that sort of thing), but using VPNs or foreign credit cards to subscribe to a service that isn't available to you because the company selling it doesn't have a license to do so is still, technically, piracy.

Much like how visiting Canada to purchase much cheaper prescription drugs is not "stealing" drugs even though it means that drug manufacturers are getting less revenue than if you bought the drugs in the USA. (I'll admit being guilty of that one when my mother was on an expensive prescription drug that was not covered under her insurance plan. I helped her source the same drug for 20% of the cost at a Canadian Pharmacy, otherwise she couldn't have afforded it and would have had to use a less effective substitute (with more side effects) that was covered under insurance.

But in most cases you aren't. Sure you pay netflix, but netflix just keeps the money. They definitely don't go find and pay the right people.

Surely they must have predicted a substantial drop in subscription rates as soon as people realize they can't watch the good stuff.

It just seems like international-marketshare suicide.

The amount of people who can figure out a VPN solution is probably not that substantial.

They hopefully have enough power and leverage to stop the content producers from stupidly restricting access via region, but they're not able to do this effectively if users can easily bypass the restrictions.

If it doesn't work out then at least they'll get a global audience for their own content and the rest will go back to piracy.

Ever since my first experience with Netflix powered by a Roku I have been praising how awesome it is, trying to get my friends to sign up for the service.

And then the geofencing crap happened but the service was suddenly available in our country, but with minus 90 percent of the content - a lot of my friends signed up and then cancelled their subscription.

I for one am seriously thinking about canceling both unblock-us and Netflix as I suddenly feel a 'localized' citizen with no way to legally we global anymore and it sucks.

-- David Fullagar is Vice President of Content Delivery Architecture at Netflix.

https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/evolving-proxy-det...

So they're either reading signatures left on the packets by various VPN / proxy technologies (fragmentation and other obscure metrics), or they're blocking the IP ranges of major hosting providers, or both.

"Don't get mad at us, they're making us do it. We're leading by example, maybe someday everybody will realize that regional restrictions are a bad idea."

But their licensing and handling of House of Cards prevents them from taking the moral high ground.

I use this subreddit to find a trusted one: https://www.reddit.com/r/PopCornTime/

https://popcorntime.sh

The source code is still on Github, and new mirrors appear every once and then.

No? Then why is it piracy if I do the exact same thing by different technical means? (Streaming the content instead of buying a physical disk)

Companies don't do things for no reason...

If you have an American show, Sky or BBC will pay more than Netflix will.

Plus, people in developing countries can't and won't pay western prices for content. It makes sense to geofence and then sell it to them much cheaper.

Interestingly up to a few years ago it was pretty much legal to put stuff up on the internet and let others download it. The Canadian government had to pass a law to specifically address that. The funny thing was that during the period before the law there was an internet legend that downloading was OK and uploading was illegal when in fact it was the opposite.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_sharing_in_Canada

Piracy will only continue to make it more difficult for small and mid-sized companies to compete. The multi-national corporations will always have the resources to wait out the slaughter.

The end result will be the same as what we have with the music industry: huge companies owning all of the media.

I like how Netflix says that we are very vocal, but minor and 'inconsequential'. Well yeah, fuck you too!

Your comment "this awesome clip the world is laughing and talking about" refers to SNL, but there are examples of viral videos that didn't originate from a big-name US studio. "Charlie bit my finger" and "Gangnam Style" are two examples. I don't think it's too much of a stretch that English-language long-form content (30-60 minute series) can be developed without having a "Made in America" imprimatur on it. Danish crime shows are popular in Europe and the UK, while Korean dramas are extremely popular in East Asian markets. Indian cinema is also popular in the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. A small slice of British shows like Made in Chelsea have carved out a niche in English-speaking markets like the US, Canada and Australia.

I hope production studios large and small across the world are seeing this as an opportunity to expand past their borders rather than simply continue "Business as usual" under the protectionism offered with these types of restrictive licensing rules.

In short, I'm kind of confused with why you don't agree and then talk about a completely different subject. Yes, good opportunity, but that doesn't stop the feelings for existing content that is also good, unless you consider it irrelevant, which you might, but I still like some premium US based stuff. Geo-blocking, at least to me, and I'm sure many others, feels like discrimination. Not all have to feel that way for it to be true.

And since Netflix is such a big party, they have blame too.