Australia: VPN Users Aren't Breaching Copyright (abc.net.au) 117
Slashdot reader Zanadou writes: The Australian Government Productivity Commission in a draft report recommended that Australian consumers should be able to legally circumvent geoblocking restrictions that have prevented them from using foreign online streaming services like Netflix, and that the Australian Government needs to send a clear message that it is not an infringement of copyright for consumers to be able evade geoblocking technology. Karen Chester, a commissioner with the Productivity Commission, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that geoblocking restrictions have the opposite effect of encouraging internet piracy. "Making copyright material more accessible and more competitively priced online, and not geoblocking, is the best antidote to copyright infringement."
In probably related news, Australia topped the list of countries who illegally downloaded the Game Of Thrones season six premiere, this week.
In January Netflix's chief product officer admitted that the company has no magic solution to subscribers who use VPNs to circumvent geoblocking.
In probably related news, Australia topped the list of countries who illegally downloaded the Game Of Thrones season six premiere, this week.
In January Netflix's chief product officer admitted that the company has no magic solution to subscribers who use VPNs to circumvent geoblocking.
Australia is breaching international treaty (Score:1)
Copyright laws are negotiated through international treaties. That includes circumventing geographical restrictions. Australia is in violation.
Re:Australia is breaching international treaty (Score:4, Interesting)
That's okay. Treaties, like governments, should never last more than a generation anyway. Otherwise you enslave your kids to your bad deals.
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That's not really true as some treaties deserve to last more then a generation. Should we scrap the treaty that keeps the Great Lakes a non-militarized zone? What about the peace treaty with England that recognized the newly independent country of the USA.
Trade deals, which often aren't even treaties, should always have a reasonable out, eg for NAFTA I believe a participant can leave with 6 months notice and most trade deals and sometimes other treaties are like that, 6 months to a years notice and you can
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Treaties should only last a generation. Then when they're about to expire they can be revisited and renegotiated.
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So every generation we renegotiate the international borders? Renegotiate the price we agreed to pay? Perhaps Russia is not happy now at only getting a few million dollars for Alaska. Or the French want to renegotiate the Louisiana purchase.
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Think of it as having to renew your marriage vows every 20-25 years or so.
And international borders, they are prison walls, they should have been abolished with the end of World War 2. They only serve the stratification interests of business. All the nationalist/religious ideology is to motivate your army to work for cheap [nbcnews.com], but even those ISIS guys don't work for free.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Thank you for the reference...
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Copyright laws are negotiated through international treaties. That includes circumventing geographical restrictions. Australia is in violation.
Good for Australia in this case. The rest of us will follow shortly.
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I didn't sign your treaty, and I don't recognise it.
Re:Australia is breaching international treaty (Score:5, Insightful)
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Berne convention doesn't cover Geoblocks.
Australia is a signatory to the Berne convention and does enforce it's copyright laws. It just doesn't do 3/4 of the shit the USA does outside the convention to please Sonny Bono and Disney.
Re: Australia is breaching international treaty (Score:5, Insightful)
G'Day, Australia here. I never claimed that I'd recognise region blocking as a component of copyright law - and my local laws are already quite clear on that fact. So long as my citizens are accessing the content in a manner that's legal in the region it was released, then that's fine with me.
Speaking as a nation of course, I don't have a lot of patience for anyone who refuses to sell something here, then complains about my citizens buying that content somewhere else. I've even less patience for anyone who tries to stop my citizens buying their product, then complains about it being stolen!
Sincerely Yours,
The Sovereign Nation of Australia
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Bingo
It's not piracy if the person is watching US Netflix from Australia. It IS piracy if the video is an unauthorized distribution downloaded from BitTorrent.
To frame this, you have to pay 10$/mo for the VPN on top of the 8$/mo for Netflix. So the Aussies are already paying for this geoblocking bullshit. It may become standard fare that everyone outside the US buys into a VPN just to circumvent restrictive content policies in their home countries, not just trying to access US content.
For example, Germany a
Re:Australia is breaching international treaty (Score:5, Interesting)
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To be fair, the contract you signed with Netflix says you won't circumvent geographic restrictions.
I'm not. Their geographic restriction allows me to connect to their service via a VPN in another country.
If they implement a geographic restriction that doesn't allow me to do this then I will stop doing that since that.
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But a contract that breaks the law is not a contract in law. So... if the govt made it expressly legal to circumvent it, then that clause in the contract would be void.
This is run of the mill stuff - you often see language in contracts "...to the extent enforceable by law...".
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2 seconds on google would let you discover that you don't need a signature to make a contract.
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An artist doesn't get to say when or where you're allowed to hear his music or play his CD.
To a limited extent he does, if it is a public performance. Check out "right of publicity".
Re: Australia is breaching international treaty (Score:2, Insightful)
Youre just jealous you cant live there, instead of whatever squalid shithole you come from, just like 99% of the planet.
Fucking peasant. Get back in the factory and make me another frying pan.
Re: Australia is breaching international treaty (Score:1)
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Not for long, thanks to John Key and his super fun policies and ideas which are dismantling the systems and destroying the country I grew up in.
Wonderful! (Score:5, Interesting)
Does this mean I'll be able to watch MasterChef Australia and MKR in the US, without torrenting them like I do now? Maybe catch some extra videos from Ten's website?
Re: Wonderful! (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed.
My wife is a fan of a few different Aussie shows. We used to use Unblock-Us.com to access Netflix content in a bunch of regions, and Australia was one of them.
We live in Canada. We honestly didn't even care much for access to the US library, as many users did. Between access to AU, UK, and IR we got the shows we wanted.
Now its back to pirating because i haven't a clue where else to find some of them. Amazon doesn't carry the DVD's, no luck at local distributors. Outside of traveling to these places and trying to buy them and bring back home (which introduces even more problem, even ignoring the travel cost), I don't know where else to find them.
I guess they don't want my money, so fuck 'em.
Re: Wonderful! (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed. We don't find much US TV that is all that interesting to us. I would say about 70% of our watching is UK or AU and most of the other 30% is PBS. We're really sad that DocZone is off the air now, our favorite CA show (I miss Corner Gas too.) Replying to this I'm actually watching Selling Homes Australia. I think the only mainstream US show we watch is Deadliest Catch, but we live in a small native fishing village on the Salish Sea. Our ISP is run by the Tribes so I'm not really worried about a copyright notice.
So we don't have cable, our one big screen is just a monitor for the old linux box that is our torrent host. We have Amazon Prime but to be honest, it just as easy to torrent the show and not worry about buffering.
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I went with https://www.privateinternetacc... [privateint...access.com] for $40/mo unlimited. It also has UK endpoints.
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I went with https://www.privateinternetacc... [privateint...access.com] for $40/mo unlimited. It also has UK endpoints.
Whoa, I didn't even know they had that high-end a service!
My $40/year account works just fine for me...
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Good catch.
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Good catch.
Haha, no worries. I was honestly wondering if they maybe did have a secret super-ultimate-ninja account, only available to the select few...
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I've used PIA off and on for years, but a few months ago I let my sub lapse because even US -> US was being blocked by Netflix. Has this improved?
Actually...I haven't used it for Netflix for years now. I just don't find anything in the American catalog interesting enough to jump through the hoops, so sorry, not sure if it's 'fixed' yet!
Purchasing digital content from Amazon US however... :)
Re:Wonderful! (Score:5, Insightful)
If those Australian show producers don't want to bother with separate releases in the U.S., then just allow people in the U.S. to subscribe to them online as if they were in Australia. Or if they are contracted with a U.S. affiliate to release those shows, then pressure those affiliates to release them in a timely manner. (And vice versa for shows from other countries in Australia of course.)
Re:Wonderful! (Score:4, Informative)
The reason content producers are doing it the way they are is simple. Money All the distributors are willing to pay $$$$$ for geographic distribution exclusivity. If they weren't granted it (say, to give Netflix the ability to show it too), then they'd only be willing to pay $, and Netflix pays $. So the math is obvious - with geographic limitations, you get $$$$$. With no geographic restrictions, you only get $$.
It's no longer about timing or variable pricing - timing on a lot of shows can be 24 hours worldwide, and pricing is set locally - based again on the exclusivity.
I'm sure Netflix COULD try to pay for worldwide distribution, but then you'd be basically paying $100/month for Netflix - because someone has to max up the difference in the money that the content producers will get going exclusive versus not.
Remember, you're paying for a right to a virtual monopoly, so you're going to pay a lot of money. If you're going to have to compete, you're not going to pay a lot of money. That's where the difference in the money is.
Now, more t hings like this could help reduce the payments - because those distributors will lean on the providers and tell them that unless they enforce the blocks, they're not going to pay so much anymore for the programming. Then it's a back and forth -- will the loss of money from that distributor be made up by offering other companies the right to distribute non-exclusively?
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I think that's true in some markets, but not in others.
In Australia (as in the UK), there isn't
Re: Wonderful! (Score:2)
Remember, you're paying for a right to a virtual monopoly, so you're going to pay a lot of money.
Here's an interesting idea: given that they do have a monopoly over that content, how about we start enforcing antitrust/competition law on it? That would mean no more requiring a foxtel (cable, for non-Aussies) subscription to view a single piece of content. You could achieve this with the existing CCA, which defines markets (for the purpose of defining a monopoly) as having some element of substitution between products within them, though it would definitely be a novel interpretation.
Alternatively, we cou
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If you've seen the US version of MC... let me just say, Gordon Ramsey is a host.
Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, you just don't need to be able to pay for it, those selling it to you need to be able to legally do so ;). Free market principles of course demand all need to be able to access the market upon an equal market, otherwise the market is not free but cartel based, specifically designed to enrich the core cartel operators by excluding the majority from equal access to the market. So in Australia people do not want to pay for shitty foxtel with commercials, seriously what the fuck, pay to watch commercials, just to watch one series with the story busted up with rubbish commercials.
Personally I just wait till the end of the season so I can binge watch. Make it available for sale and I will buy it, be dicks and block sale for years and well, I'll still watch it and fuck foxtel, corrupt shit heads.
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Great.
So, I also assume when you purchase such items overseas you declare them to Australian tax authorities, and make sure you pay the required tarrifs, GST, etc on them?
You do realise that those need to be paid in most situations, right?
Its a slightly different concern, however it also matters.
How much local tax to you think Steam, Google, and Netflix pay on content accessed from the US?
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GST, the only relevant tax, is only due on products with a value of over AU$1000. Consumers generally, there are exceptions, don't face state specific taxes in Australia so imports are processed for tax liability at the national border. I have imported multiple things that have exceeded that threshold, I receive notification from Customs that they are holding it pending payment of the GST liability. I pay it and they on ship it.
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Some formats of movies and video games are supposed to be region locked.
Cars are also region locked to some degree, as you usually have to pay a hefty price to get a car purchased abroad approved for driving locally.
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An Australian was living in the US for a little while, and his son was in my scout troop. He really liked his Dodge Ram, so looked into what it would take to bring it into Australia (right hand driving country). It would cost $40k for the conversion of the $35k truck to be able to import it to Australia. That is very sad, why can't the poor Australians drive American style trucks!
A Book (Score:5, Interesting)
I traveled overseas a few years back. On my trip, I bought a book. On the copyright notice page it states that this book is only authorized for sale in the country I was visiting. I then flew back to the USA (where this particular edition is not available) with my book. Have I broken a law or violated a copyright?
As I see it, Australian citizens are simply purchasing material at a point of sale within the USA (the VPN's point of presence) and then they are using private means to move the material to their home. I flew. They used a VPN.
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Only if you purchase lots of copies, import them and then try to sell in the US.
You have no idea what you are on about.
Those notices have no legal weight. They are a notice and a clue for anyone trying to track down sales which constitute a breach of contract. The publisher sells the books to the distributor with the understanding that they will be sold in a specific market. If those books are being sold elsewhere, then you know about it because of the custom cover and you can try to track down the distributor.
Once you buy something, it is yours. You can resell it to anyone you want, u
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Only if you purchase lots of copies, import them and then try to sell in the US.
Wrong. [wikipedia.org]
Why one Australian torrents Game Of Thrones (Score:1)
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/why-i-refuse-to-feel-sorry-for-pirating-game-of-thrones-20160428-gohqzi.html
Parallell importation (Score:5, Interesting)
This has most likely been legal regardless always. Back in the 90s we had a big drama over government laws introduced guaranteeing "parallell importation". The concept being that the consumer (and retailer) was guaranteed the right to bypass local importers and import their own stuff if they can get a better deal. This was particularly targetted at the music industry where CD distribution monopolies had kept album prices at around the $30 mark which in the 1990s was pretty damn exorbitant. The music industry had a fit about it, right down to big public scare campaigns about how it would ~somehow~ make music more expensive and cause australian musicians to go bankerupt because pirates would make cds in indoneisa or china and sell them cheap here legally. Which of course was nonsense since none of this authorized piracy. The laws also meant CD players where required to be multi region.
Later the laws where used to prohibit sony and microsoft going after modchippers , and enforced DVD multi-region requirements. This all was going great until the conserative Howard government came in and I think, but I cant prove, they told the ACCC to stop enforcing the parallell import laws. And we got DMCA style laws for copyright which actually reversed many of the freedoms of parallell import.
None the less, they ARE still on the book, so I guess this rulings most important result is clarifying that technological measures to circumvent geoblocking do not violate copyright laws.
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Parallel Imports (I once worked for eBay Australia) was a laughable thing.
We were told, point blank, to ignore all parallel import takedowns because they were overreach. You'd get companies like Microsoft and Adobe going after EVERY person selling their product in Australia that wasn't an authorized Adobe/Microsoft dealer for Australia. So the end-game here was that US legitimate companies would geoblock selling to Australia by removing the shipping options to Australia and instead the Australians would buy
Netflix doesn't need a magic bullet. (Score:3)
In January Netflix's chief product officer admitted that the company has no magic solution to subscribers who use VPNs to circumvent geoblocking.
The population of Australia is 23 million. The number of Netflix subscribers in Australia is about 1 million. Respectable. But from the studios point of view these are not big numbers and a leak here and there isn't going to matter very much.
They are big numbers to Presto and Stan, Netflix's rivals in Australia --- which means that for Netflix the Australian VPN is win-win.
It undercuts its regional rivals, before they can become too strong, at very little cost to its own bottom line and without damaging its relations with the studios.
DMCA (Score:3)
It's a stupid law, it needs to be repealed, etc. etc. But Australians are doing it wrong if they argue they're morally or legally right in Australia. The only thing that matters is what happens in the US.
That said, the beauty of breaking the law from within a foreign country is that it's a lot harder for the wronged company to get relief. Especially if the foreign government disagrees with the US. By hurting American companies economically, the trickle down effect *may* be that the stupid law will get revisited. So rock on Aussies ;-)
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Due to the DMCA, in America, any method, no matter how flimsy, to protect the content from being seen by Australians in Australia is good enough. So because the method (aka geoblocking) now exists, the bad guys (aka Australians living in Australia) have been prevented and all is good in the world. But
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Does geoblocking always count as a "protection method" under the DMCA?
IANA(US)L, obviously, but the answer is "maybe". The question of what exactly constitutes a TPM was tested in the High Court of Australia, and they found that a TPM has to be a copy control measure, not just an access control measure. Hence, the mere circumventing of geoblocking is not illegal because you didn't try to get around copy protection, you only got around access control.
In fact, the decision (which was about PlayStation modchipping) explicitly pointed out that differential pricing was a risk: "If
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How exactly are we committing a crime in the US? I am in Australia. Netflix are providing access to me in Australia. I am making a trade with an Australian credit card and I am making the purchase in Australian dollars for an Australian account. All that is happening is that I connect to a VPN and Netflix provides me with different content. That they provide me with different content is their choice, not mine.
I frankly don't give a fuck what the DMCA states. Or in fact any other law on US books. I am
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"I don't think that what the Australian Government thinks matters here."
I think you'll find the Australian Government matters very much within Australia.
Read the whole report! (Score:5, Informative)
Quite apart from the geoblocking issue - there's a whole tonne of interesting recommendations in the draft report [pc.gov.au].
For those who aren't familiar, the Productivity Commission is a major Australian Government advisory body/think tank that conducts public inquiries into matters of economic policy. The Government requested a broad report into the economic effectiveness of the intellectual property system.
This report is a draft - the Commission is presently taking public submissions that will be considered for the final report later this year.
Highlights from the findings and recommendations:
All of which seems in line with what I consider sensible policy reform. Of course, whether the Government will consider any of these recommendations at all is a completely different question...
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> it would be more appropriate to limit copyright to 15-25 years after creation
I wish that australia, or some other big western country would do this.
Of course the US, and other countries would go into complete meltdown and probably throw up all kinds of sanctions to please their corporate overlords.
But that is far more reasonable.
Rip-off Australia (Score:1)
Game of Thrones nonsense (Score:5, Informative)