People will probably just torrent things again. In the minds of the vast majority of people piracy is a victimless crime. These people have only stopped pirating because it's easier to pay and use Netflix. Guaranteed they'll go back to torrenting.
Gabe Newell: "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
Again? I used to regularly check Netflix before Pirate Bay, but it's been so long since anything I wanted to watch was streamable on Netflix (and I'm in the US too) that I rarely bother anymore. Even at the best of times it was maybe 50/50.
Hell, I torrented "The Man in the High Castle" even though I have Amazon Prime just because I didn't feel like installing Silverlight. Even when you are paying for the content, it can still be easier to watch via other means.
They (I'm talking about publishers I don't believe this benefits Netflix in any way) are doing this at the time when Popcorn Time is available, and when you can add SuperRepo to Kodi and stream pirated movies from 1Channel.
I mean at this point the only reason people would want to use Netflix is feeling guilty about pirating. But how can you feel guilty when publisher is constantly trying to screw you over?
>Gabe Newell: "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
And yet trackers are filled with content available on Steam, iTunes, Amazon instant, etc.
The idea that piracy is only a service problem is just as big of a myth as the idea that it is purely a pricing issue. It's can be both or either depending on the person.
Gabe's spot on the money for my use case. I used to pirate games relentlessly, all the way back to Amiga 500 days. Then Steam came along, got relatively stable, and I've not pirated a game since.
It's actually harder to get a pirated game now than one off Steam - you have to find a torrent or download location, find patches (if there are any), scour comments to see if there's any hint of malice in the download, and if it's not a popular game (or an old one), your torrent might take a long time. There are some limitations with Steam (including "what if it goes away?"), but the overall experience is much more frictionless.
Yes. I don't know why content producers don't get this.
I really want to legally buy/rent my media, but so much content just isn't available on iTunes in Austria.
And even when it is, it's a pain in the ass. We bought a few films for our kids to watch, but when I copied them to my old computer I couldn't play them because of the DRM. So I look for a way to strip the DRM from the files I legally bought so I can play them, which turns out to be surprisingly hard, and I just give up and torrent the film.
Agreed. However, my ISP throttles torrents drastically during peak hours. It sucks. I can use Netflix with little issue, but I can't download a torrent faster than 25kbps
It would really surprise me if people at Netflix would read your comment and be shocked by the news. They are probably fighting against that localisation as much as they can, but the old structures/corps/cultures/laws are still too big and stubborn for a single company to completely beat them. So Netflix and co have to compromise. And they are still doing quite well, I'd say.
> Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem
agreed;
I have Netflix and HBO, and still regularly download videos and tv shows. It saddens me to see how little content is available legally. Some TV shows become available 1 or 2 years after being released in the US, for example at the moment i can't see Once Upon a Time season 5 (the previous seasons are on Netflix). So what are our options, wait 2 years even though you know it's already out there right now?
Not even the TV show Friends is available on Netflix where i live (in Europe). Sucks ass.
Netflix has an obvious economic incentive to allow location spoofing. As long as you are paying them, they make money. I read a statistic that claimed Netflix had ~300k users in Australia, even though Netflix was technically "not available" in Australia.
The content rights-holders are the ones dependent on the licensing restrictions. They're the ones who get upset when users circumvent those restrictions, not Netflix.
Netflix faces two threats: 1) economic loss from foreign subscribers canceling their subscription because location spoofing no longer works, and 2) economic loss from rights-holders suing Netflix for a negligently insufficient blocking system.
It is in Netflix's best interest to only haphazardly block spoofing, i.e. implement a weak technical system, as long as they can legally prove they are making a "best effort" to detect and block location spoofing. Of course, any semi-technical person knows that even a best effort will fail, because any sort of blocking system is an endless game of cat-and-mouse that Netflix can never win.
Basically, yeah, they're "blocking" proxies, but ;-) ;-) ;-), they know you can still do it.
I don't necessarily think the threat is "rights-holders suing Netflix for a negligently insufficient blocking system", but instead right-holders keeping their content away from Netflix if there's no working mechanism to restrict the content to the geographic region they negotiated.
In the end the right holders sell their content multiple times, often even multiple times within a single market. Now if everybody in the world can get US Netflix content the right-holders are the ones who will have problems selling content in other markets.
I agree, I think they intentionally do the bare minimum to stop spoofing, because they really don't care. Just point your computer / device to a dns server. That's a joke. I'm sure all they'll do is blacklist know vpn IPs.
Well, considering the fact that on US Netflix I can access 6000 titles and local Netflix doesn't even have 500 (and most of them aren't anything I'm interested in) that pretty much just means I'll stop paying the subscription :/
Since there's pretty much no other source of most of the shows locally except for buying extremely expensive BluRays I guess people will just revert to torrenting.
If I went back 25 years or so and showed my younger self the Internet of today, what would probably surprise me the most is how stubbornly we've clinged to political borders and the extent to which we've tried to graft them onto a mostly border-less computer network. I was pretty convinced back then that the internet would help to blur the lines between States, but it appears that the opposite has happened.
I use a proxy service as the South Africa content library is piss poor , no use saying you are available in the country if you can only carry a small selection.
Naspers owns the satellite tv market here and they launched a streaming service months before Netflix arrived and signed up all the good stuff.
I think this is lip service directed at international content owners as they expand globally. They might try and shut down access for a few of the current big names, but we all know this won't be effective longer than people can stay one step ahead.
Netflix doesn't actually care about people using VPNs as long as they're collecting $10 a month. In fact if Netflix could do away with regional content restrictions entirely, they'd massively benefit.
This is one of the two biggest reasons that Netflix is pushing into original content, second to only third party content getting more expensive/exclusive. Netflix doesn't have to deal with any of this if they own the rights to the content streaming on the service.
I would seriously HATE to be one of Netflix's content negotiators. That has to be one frustrating job trying to get content producers to realize they have been asleep for the past decade and the world has changed.
The content is one thing, but I could live with country based restrictions. What I'm afraid is the availability of subtitles.
I'm from a country in Northern Europe and live in a country in Central Europe. I want my movies and series without dubbing, and with English subtitles. US Netflix has been a perfect solution for this.
> Some members use proxies or “unblockers” to access titles available outside their territory. To address this, we employ the same or similar measures other firms do. This technology continues to evolve and we are evolving with it. That means in coming weeks, those using proxies and unblockers will only be able to access the service in the country where they currently are. We are confident this change won’t impact members not using proxies.
Netflix doesn't need to block 100% of proxies - they just need blocking that's good enough that people licensing content to them won't sue or withdraw their content.
Figuring out the IP addresses used by free and commercial proxies shouldn't be too hard - they just need to create some test accounts, sign up for the proxy services, then check what IP addresses their test accounts appeared to connect from. That'll block anyone who isn't technical enough to set up their own server.
If they're feeling enthusiastic enough, they could go further - for example blocking IP ranges used by big hosting providers and seedbox providers; and monitor the main forums and subreddits to learn about any new bypasses they need to clamp down on.
They don't need to know. They can show you the content that corresponds to the country matching your billing information, regardless of your IP address. It doesn't say they're going to block proxies, only that you won't be able to use proxies to watch content not available in your country.
They'll block known VPN/Proxy endpoints I guess. I bet spinning up your own proxy/VPN will still work. Although they might block entire networks like EC2 and DigitalOcean too.
If they are serious, they could tie your account to your country, so when you are in "another country", either virtually or physically, you could only watch things available in both you account's country and your access country.
"How are they going to do this? I mean, anyone could spin up a machine located in the US within a few minutes - how would they know?"
They can't. They can identify commercial proxy providers and the IP blocks they utilize and block them. Maybe they can auto-identify subnets based on their ARIN registration text ... it's still just a wack-a-mole process.
If you own your own IP space in the US that you use for your own purposes, it will presumably work forever.
Or, put another way, if you are truly a peer on the Internet, you can continue to do the things it was meant for. If not, you're just a media consumer.
Reuters may be botching up terminology. Perhaps Netflix closing the door on regional workarounds using DNS redirects. Failing that, Netflix may block service to IP subsets owned by popular Proxy services only. If you set up a proxy using your own machine or a smaller service, it may still work.
Do whois on ip address, there are addresses that belong to data centers, so between that an manually compiling a list of netmasks belonging to various proxy providers you can get something going. Not without failure I guess.
More importantly, how are they to know what country lies on the other end of the tunnel, so that they could determine what is not available locally there?
I think this is a bit of hand-waving to placate certain rights holders. If subscribers who VPN from the U.S. to the U.S.--perhaps for privacy purposes--are affected, and they make enough noise, Netflix will likely back off to "well, at least we tried" intensity.
I'm guessing they are going to use a service that provides a list of proxy ips, and block those. It won't be complete, but it will cover the vast majority.
Someone should build a p2p proxy system specifically for Netflix. It would be pretty hard to block, and the risk for hosts would be low if it was limited to netflix ips only.
I assume Netflix would happily stream everything everywhere but the content producers that license the content want strict control over who sees what when. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Content producers tend to want to distribute their products for as wide an area as possible, which means needing to negotiate exclusivity rights with the providers of certain countries. As such, netflix can't negotiate with the content providers to gain rights, because the providers already sold those rights to other parties. Good streaming services are a relatively new phenomena, and as such, it's going to take a while for content providers to renegotiate deals to provide the content for the newer definition of what the widest area of distribution is.
So, in short, blame the local distribution entities as much as the content producers for not providing streaming services for the content they have the right to broadcast at this point in time.
I often switch countries via VPN multiple times a day to access certain shows or movies, and thus had access to a really large library. This fulfilled 99% of my video entertainment needs, and piracy was generally no longer required. I even changed my habits and no longer need to watch everything new ASAP, but now I can wait until it is available somewhere in the world via Netflix.
I'm not sure if that is true but I always felt that by using Netflix, even if it was somewhat fraudulent in the "wrong" country, the content owner did get their few pennies "from me" for my view.
Imagine if you were blocked from reading an ebook because you crossed a border. Regional/national licensing of content is a rent-seeking anachronism. It's really sad to see Netflix cave on this.
Incidentally, this is more or less contrary to what's happened with VAT in the EU, where if you buy digital content online, your are charged VAT for your home country if that's where your credit card is from and you choose it as your residing country in a purchase form - even if you are in another country when you make the purchase.
In Europe, as I understand it, Netflix is going to be forced to make sure your home country content goes with you, even when you leave the country (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35051054). I'm not sure if this means you will also be excluded from seeing content available in the country you've travelled to, if it's not available in your home country, but essentially it means you're sort of carrying around your nationality when you are accessing content online, just like you can now carry around your country's sales tax. It's the worst of all worlds. Imagine if e.g. companies allowed the Chinese government's restrictions to content to be imposed on its citizens outside china too. Yes, the EU looks like it's trying to get rid of some of the weird barriers to portability of content, but there's a chance this could go in the wrong direction.
In any case, the whole system is artificial, profoundly inefficient and unethical in a number of ways.
[+] [-] sergiotapia|10 years ago|reply
Gabe Newell: "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
[+] [-] 0xffff2|10 years ago|reply
Hell, I torrented "The Man in the High Castle" even though I have Amazon Prime just because I didn't feel like installing Silverlight. Even when you are paying for the content, it can still be easier to watch via other means.
[+] [-] takeda|10 years ago|reply
I mean at this point the only reason people would want to use Netflix is feeling guilty about pirating. But how can you feel guilty when publisher is constantly trying to screw you over?
[+] [-] rhino369|10 years ago|reply
And yet trackers are filled with content available on Steam, iTunes, Amazon instant, etc.
The idea that piracy is only a service problem is just as big of a myth as the idea that it is purely a pricing issue. It's can be both or either depending on the person.
[+] [-] vacri|10 years ago|reply
It's actually harder to get a pirated game now than one off Steam - you have to find a torrent or download location, find patches (if there are any), scour comments to see if there's any hint of malice in the download, and if it's not a popular game (or an old one), your torrent might take a long time. There are some limitations with Steam (including "what if it goes away?"), but the overall experience is much more frictionless.
[+] [-] jakobegger|10 years ago|reply
I really want to legally buy/rent my media, but so much content just isn't available on iTunes in Austria.
And even when it is, it's a pain in the ass. We bought a few films for our kids to watch, but when I copied them to my old computer I couldn't play them because of the DRM. So I look for a way to strip the DRM from the files I legally bought so I can play them, which turns out to be surprisingly hard, and I just give up and torrent the film.
[+] [-] JTon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eva1984|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DavideNL|10 years ago|reply
agreed;
I have Netflix and HBO, and still regularly download videos and tv shows. It saddens me to see how little content is available legally. Some TV shows become available 1 or 2 years after being released in the US, for example at the moment i can't see Once Upon a Time season 5 (the previous seasons are on Netflix). So what are our options, wait 2 years even though you know it's already out there right now?
Not even the TV show Friends is available on Netflix where i live (in Europe). Sucks ass.
[+] [-] chatmasta|10 years ago|reply
The content rights-holders are the ones dependent on the licensing restrictions. They're the ones who get upset when users circumvent those restrictions, not Netflix.
Netflix faces two threats: 1) economic loss from foreign subscribers canceling their subscription because location spoofing no longer works, and 2) economic loss from rights-holders suing Netflix for a negligently insufficient blocking system.
It is in Netflix's best interest to only haphazardly block spoofing, i.e. implement a weak technical system, as long as they can legally prove they are making a "best effort" to detect and block location spoofing. Of course, any semi-technical person knows that even a best effort will fail, because any sort of blocking system is an endless game of cat-and-mouse that Netflix can never win.
Basically, yeah, they're "blocking" proxies, but ;-) ;-) ;-), they know you can still do it.
[+] [-] thetrb|10 years ago|reply
In the end the right holders sell their content multiple times, often even multiple times within a single market. Now if everybody in the world can get US Netflix content the right-holders are the ones who will have problems selling content in other markets.
[+] [-] malchow|10 years ago|reply
It seems almost inevitable that they will enforce this rule only lazily.
[+] [-] kilroy123|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brazzledazzle|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] izacus|10 years ago|reply
Since there's pretty much no other source of most of the shows locally except for buying extremely expensive BluRays I guess people will just revert to torrenting.
[+] [-] ryandrake|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tibbydude|10 years ago|reply
I use a proxy service as the South Africa content library is piss poor , no use saying you are available in the country if you can only carry a small selection.
Naspers owns the satellite tv market here and they launched a streaming service months before Netflix arrived and signed up all the good stuff.
[+] [-] sharkweek|10 years ago|reply
Netflix doesn't actually care about people using VPNs as long as they're collecting $10 a month. In fact if Netflix could do away with regional content restrictions entirely, they'd massively benefit.
This is one of the two biggest reasons that Netflix is pushing into original content, second to only third party content getting more expensive/exclusive. Netflix doesn't have to deal with any of this if they own the rights to the content streaming on the service.
[+] [-] jrnkntl|10 years ago|reply
Well, these series should be the ones that you should NOT need to resort to proxies for, since they're Netflix owned content.
I wonder if Smart DNS proxy servers[1] will also be affected...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_DNS_proxy_server
[+] [-] JustSomeNobody|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] distances|10 years ago|reply
I'm from a country in Northern Europe and live in a country in Central Europe. I want my movies and series without dubbing, and with English subtitles. US Netflix has been a perfect solution for this.
[+] [-] otterley|10 years ago|reply
> Some members use proxies or “unblockers” to access titles available outside their territory. To address this, we employ the same or similar measures other firms do. This technology continues to evolve and we are evolving with it. That means in coming weeks, those using proxies and unblockers will only be able to access the service in the country where they currently are. We are confident this change won’t impact members not using proxies.
[+] [-] msravi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelt|10 years ago|reply
Figuring out the IP addresses used by free and commercial proxies shouldn't be too hard - they just need to create some test accounts, sign up for the proxy services, then check what IP addresses their test accounts appeared to connect from. That'll block anyone who isn't technical enough to set up their own server.
If they're feeling enthusiastic enough, they could go further - for example blocking IP ranges used by big hosting providers and seedbox providers; and monitor the main forums and subreddits to learn about any new bypasses they need to clamp down on.
[+] [-] dangrossman|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yid|10 years ago|reply
https://www.maxmind.com/en/proxy-detection-service
Still not impossible, just a bit harder when that $5 DO droplet is no longer good enough to proxy Netflix through.
[+] [-] knotty66|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vruiz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsync|10 years ago|reply
They can't. They can identify commercial proxy providers and the IP blocks they utilize and block them. Maybe they can auto-identify subnets based on their ARIN registration text ... it's still just a wack-a-mole process.
If you own your own IP space in the US that you use for your own purposes, it will presumably work forever.
Or, put another way, if you are truly a peer on the Internet, you can continue to do the things it was meant for. If not, you're just a media consumer.
[+] [-] JTon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perlpimp|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dimillian|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logfromblammo|10 years ago|reply
I think this is a bit of hand-waving to placate certain rights holders. If subscribers who VPN from the U.S. to the U.S.--perhaps for privacy purposes--are affected, and they make enough noise, Netflix will likely back off to "well, at least we tried" intensity.
[+] [-] cmdrfred|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xur17|10 years ago|reply
Someone should build a p2p proxy system specifically for Netflix. It would be pretty hard to block, and the risk for hosts would be low if it was limited to netflix ips only.
[+] [-] miander|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miander|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ascendantlogic|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sanddancer|10 years ago|reply
So, in short, blame the local distribution entities as much as the content producers for not providing streaming services for the content they have the right to broadcast at this point in time.
[+] [-] thenipper|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johanneskanybal|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jo909|10 years ago|reply
I'm not sure if that is true but I always felt that by using Netflix, even if it was somewhat fraudulent in the "wrong" country, the content owner did get their few pennies "from me" for my view.
[+] [-] lenepp|10 years ago|reply
Incidentally, this is more or less contrary to what's happened with VAT in the EU, where if you buy digital content online, your are charged VAT for your home country if that's where your credit card is from and you choose it as your residing country in a purchase form - even if you are in another country when you make the purchase.
In Europe, as I understand it, Netflix is going to be forced to make sure your home country content goes with you, even when you leave the country (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35051054). I'm not sure if this means you will also be excluded from seeing content available in the country you've travelled to, if it's not available in your home country, but essentially it means you're sort of carrying around your nationality when you are accessing content online, just like you can now carry around your country's sales tax. It's the worst of all worlds. Imagine if e.g. companies allowed the Chinese government's restrictions to content to be imposed on its citizens outside china too. Yes, the EU looks like it's trying to get rid of some of the weird barriers to portability of content, but there's a chance this could go in the wrong direction.
In any case, the whole system is artificial, profoundly inefficient and unethical in a number of ways.
[+] [-] hkdobrev|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] merlincorey|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oconnore|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jarnix|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emergentcypher|10 years ago|reply