Netflix Warns Canadians Not to Access Netflix U.S.

[jon]

Netflix warns Canadians against virtual border hopping
The streaming service says it hasn’t changed its policy on users who try to access content licensed for other countries
By Michael Oliveira, CP
January 5, 2015 11:15 AM

TORONTO — Netflix says it hasn’t changed its policy on users who try to access content licensed for streaming in other countries.

The policy is that users shouldn’t be doing it.

It’s widely known that Canadian Netflix users can access TV shows and movies licensed for the American market by using a free or subscription-based online service.

The popular tools mask a user’s true location and trick Netflix — or other websites — into believing the user is actually somewhere else in the world, where different content is available to stream.

A news story on TorrentFreak.com suggested that Netflix has recently begun cracking down on those location-altering services.

Netflix declined an interview request but released a statement saying it hasn’t changed its policies on restricting access to content based on geography.

“Virtually crossing borders to use Netflix is a violation of our terms of use because of content licensing restrictions. We employ industry standard measures to prevent this kind of use. There hasn’t been any recent changes to the Netflix VPN policy or terms of use,” reads the statement.

A telephone poll with 2,002 anglophone Canadians commissioned last spring by the Media Technology Monitor found about 32 per cent of the respondents were Netflix subscribers.

About one in three of the Netflix users said they had figured out how to access content meant for U.S. subscribers.

The Media Technology Monitor poll was conducted by Forum Research between March 18 and April 19 of last year. The results are considered accurate within 2.2 percentage points 19 times out of 20.

[Neumann Sennheiser]

I'd be interested to know how they feel about a Canadian subscriber accessing their Netflix account from an American located device while physically in the United States.

[jon]

I'd be interested to know how they feel about a Canadian subscriber accessing their Netflix account from an American located device while physically in the United States.

Netflix got themselves into this "fix" in the first place by offering a "travel service" as part of their standard package. A Canadian vacationing in Florida for the winter doesn't have to have separate U.S. and Canadian Netflix accounts. The Canadian can use their Canadian account on the U.S. Netflix site while visiting the U.S.; in fact, Netflix's copyright agreements with the studios requires that they only allow viewing from a nation's site within that nation; in other words, that Canadian in Florida is not supposed to be allowed to view anything served from the Canadian Netflix site.

To make a long story short, whatever country you are viewing from is the country whose Netflix site you should be using to view from. Anything else is a violation of Netflix's agreement with the people from whom Netflix obtained the material you are watching.

That is where Netflix is coming from in all this.

Without a "travel service", it would have been a lot easier for Netflix to manage this issue. They would simply restrict a netflix.ca account to viewing of material from the netflix.ca servers. Unlike the '80s when Canadians could easily get service from U.S. satellite TV companies by using any valid U.S. address, today there are relatively accurate "electronic" ways to determine if a potential customer resides in a given country.

[Mike Cleaver]

I haven't looked at Netflix recently but the differences between the Canadian and US services used to be mammoth.
Canada got D grade and lower movie selections while the US had many recent releases and a much deeper and better back catalogue.
I watch very little commercial TV anymore and those programs on Netflix hold no interest for me.
Whatever means they try to use to block users in one country from getting service from another is almost laughable.
Any semi-talented computer person knows many ways to circumvent the gatekeepers.

[slowhand]

I normally ignore the comments on published articles that you see on publications' web sites.

Whether or not it is accurate, I think this one from a few minutes ago is at least interesting:

I think the key is that NetFlix doesn't *really* care when a Canadian is watching US-only content -- after all, it wins them more and happier customers for no significant extra cost. But they have to *pretend* to care, because otherwise the content owners accuse them of aiding and abetting their customers in copyright theft. So it's just enough of a token show of action to keep the MPAA et al. pacified.
user Alatark on the Business In Vancouver web site

[Tom Jeffries]

*Just a quick sidebar - if you are into streaming media - try CHROMECAST > a dongle from Amazon.ca for $35 - and you can stream you computer/pad/smartphone to a big screen in High Def. It is simply a small wifi connect and easy to set up.

It interfaces with the CHROME Browser.

It has been getting a real workout here.

*Netlfix in Canada is a shadow of Netflix, in the States.

It's starting to get crowded - with Showmi and other streaming services launching.

Do you find yourself watching less "regular" TV? We sure do.

[kal]

Differences between the US and Canadian versions of Netflix have diminished a little. I certainly don't find myself switching to a US IP as frequently as I did. One problem was that French and Italian films are often overdubbed on US Netflix rather than remaining in the original language with subtitles. Who wants to watch an Italian film overdubbed with an American voice?

As for the Chromecast ... wonderful device. Had been reduced to $29 for the past few weeks at all outlets but now back to $39. Video aside it is also a great tool for casting music from Google Play Music All Access and from Deezer, the streaming service from France that is really winning customers in North America after wider release around the world a year or two earlier. There's also the Roku Streaming Stick. Both are in use in our home.

And then there's Raditaz, about to return after a one-year hiatus. Raditaz was the streaming service that offered such wonderful features as "play me the top 100 songs from 1978" and it would dutifully comply.

[Coolcat]

Roku is by far the best when you consider Private Channels which none of the other attachments have.

[jon]

What's a VPN, are they legal and does Netflix care Canadians use them?
SHANE DINGMAN AND JEFF GRAY
The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Jan. 08 2015, 3:25 PM EST
Last updated Friday, Jan. 09 2015, 1:13 PM EST

Rumours, since denied, that Netflix is about to start cracking down on customers using software to disguise their physical location were met with shock, fury and a little confusion this week. Wait, some asked, why would any Canadian pretend they lived in America for the purposes of watching TV over the Internet?

What am I not getting?

The open secret among Canadian Netflix subscribers is that the grass really is greener on the other side of the border. On just about any story we write about Netflix here at The Globe and Mail you will find that the first or second comment left by readers will be a variation of “Get VPN and you can watch U.S. Netflix!” There are dozens of services you can use to trick Netflix into showing you what the Americans are watching.

For example: In January both U.S. and Canadian Netflix got the entire Friends library, a welcome addition if you miss Ross and Rachel or wonder if Chandler. Can. BE. Any. More. Dated?

Stuff we won’t be getting in Canada? SyFy’s Z Nation, Being Human (U.S. version) season four, The Fall season two, Beauty & the Beast season two. As of late 2014 we also weren’t getting the latest seasons of Parks and Rec, Sons of Anarchy, Arrow and Hart of Dixie. Not to mention a whole bunch of Woody Allen movies.

How are Canadians getting foreign Netflix?

The most popular method is DNS masking to hide your location. When you try to connect to a website on the Internet you are almost certainly using the Domain Name System, or DNS, to do so. If you type Netflix into your browser, the local DNS server will point you right to that site, and it’s just a faster and easier way to get there than typing in the direct Internet Protocol address like this 199.246.67.250.

Your computer also has an IP address, and the DNS server passes that information on to the end site so it can tell where you are from. This locates you in physical, and Internet space. Some sites block IP addresses from certain regions from accessing certain types of content so that users from, say, Canada, can’t watch John Stewart’s Daily Show videos or entire services such as Hulu. Netflix also uses your IP address to define its library of shows based on geography.

For as little as $5 a month services like Toronto’s UnoTelly or Barbados-based Unblock-us.com manage their own DNS servers that you can log in and access Netflix from an IP address that is not blocked. This process masks your location: Suddenly you appear to be in Youngstown, Ohio, instead of an apartment building on Yonge Street in Toronto. That grants you to access that sweet American pie, er, movies and TV shows not available in your region.

Nicholas Lin, founder of UnoTelly, has a working assumption that a third of Canadian Netflix subscribers access the U.S. catalogue somehow, and that about 200,000 people in Australia have been using Netflix despite the service not having launched there yet. One of UnoTelly’s largest customer bases is in South Africa. Canada is just in its top five. Launched in 2011, UnoTelly doesn’t take any responsibility for you violating your terms of service with Netflix – they provide you the means to do so, but they haven’t signed anything with Netflix, you did. “We are very upfront with our customers when they have access to our services,” says Mr. Lin. Moreover, “We don’t anticipate Netflix taking action against the end user.”

Make no mistake: Netflix knows you’re doing this, it will often flash a message to users, “Travelling with Netflix?” when only your IP address is on a trip.

VPN or DNS?

A Virtual Private Network is just a set of private, encrypted connections hosted on a larger network (usually the Internet). Think of it like a tunnel that takes you to a different place on the web. Let’s say you are at home and you want to log in to the office network to access files or software stuck behind a corporate firewall. Or you want to access a Netflix server in Denmark so you can watch Dallas Buyers Club.

Using software from a VPN provider, you can get access to that other local area network (LAN). It’s also more private than DNS masking, because now, not even your ISP will know what you’ve been up to, just that you’ve been connecting to one end of a VPN. Where you come out on the other side will be a mystery to them. On the other hand, you often lose some of your bandwidth, so your streaming speed can suffer.

There are many VPN providers, some come as part of a Usenet (such as VyprVPN from Giganews), some are standalone like privateinternetaccess.com or TorGuard. You pay these guys, and they move your surfing around to different locations. You can set up a VPN at your router, so all your connected devices are pushed through VPN, or you can set up connections from individual machines.

But you may not want to change your DNS permanently or always VPN tunnel to other countries: There are online services and content offered inside Canada that are geoblocked elsewhere, Downton Abbey for instance is available in Netflix Canada but not in the U.S.

How do I find the stuff I’m missing out on?

A fun (or depressing) game you can play on sites like Moreflicks.com is browsing which movies or TV shows are available on streaming services in which nations.

There are 53 million Netflix users worldwide and there are slightly different versions of the Netflix library in every nation: So there’s a Netflix for Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Germany, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Not to mention 43 countries in Latin and South America.

In the U.K. you can watch Draft Day starring Kevin Costner (a rare 2014 movie, which is already on U.S. Netflix), and later this month Disney will be showing Aladdin. Also, the AMC Breaking Bad spinoff series Better Call Saul will be available for streaming when it debuts in February – in the U.S. and Canada we’ll have to wait until the season finale. Pro tip: Don’t sleep on Netflix Denmark: They have Matthew McConaughey‘s Oscar-winning Dallas Buyers Club this month.

Why all this variation? Technology writer and columnist Ivor Tossell explained it well the other day:

Netflix catalogues are different in different countries because licensing deals are split between different countries. A media owner might have sold the rights to broadcast a piece of video to a Canadian media company. If Canadians watch that content on Netflix instead of through the channel that paid for the Canadian rights, that channel loses out on the putative revenue it would have generated – say, from advertising on its own site.

But is faking a U.S. IP address illegal?

Lawyers say is it unlikely that using a VPN to access U.S. Netflix or other similar foreign services could be considered a breach of U.S. or Canadian copyright law – although they agree that such a longshot argument could be made.

“There is an argument that could be made that you are circumventing ... the technical measures that protect the content‎,” said David Fewer, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who heads the Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic. “I said it’s an ‘argument’ because I don’t think it’s a very good argument at all.”

Prof. Fewer said he doubts that the use of a VPN qualified as the breaking of a digital lock on a device designed to prohibit unauthorized copying, since it merely cloaks a user’s IP address.

Lawyers agree that the practice could violate Netflix’s “terms of use,” or the contract the company has with its consumers, as the company itself has said. But the ramifications of breaking these terms for consumers are few, as lawyers doubt Netflix would ever find it in its interest to try to sue its paying customers.

Ottawa intellectual property lawyer Howard Knopf, with Macera & Jarzyna LLP, said the pressure must be coming from the copyright holders.

“This is another manifestation of that good old Canadian phenomenon known as cross-border shopping in a free market.

“‎Some Canadian rights owners and licensees seem to think it’s smart to limit Canadian choice and raise Canadian prices. Maybe they are being shortsighted or greedy but that’s what they try to do,” Mr. Knopf said.

There has also been some speculation in the United States that using a VPN to hide your IP address could fall afoul of an obscure U.S. law, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). In 2013, a U.S. federal judge in California ruled that a company that used a VPN to defy a ban and continue “scraping” apartment rental-data from the classified-ads site Craigslist had violated the CFAA. But legal experts disagreed on whether the ruling could have any broader implications.

So all this running around is just for Netflix?

Right now, mostly yes. Sandvine, a network equipment provider that compiles a lot of data on how we’re using our Internet capacity, reported in November that “Netflix is the leading application in Canada, and on select networks, can account for between 30-40 per cent of downstream traffic in the peak evening hours. Three years ago, Netflix accounted for just 13.5 per cent of evening traffic in Canada.”

In North America Amazon Instant Video (available as part of a $99 a year Prime subscription in the U.S.) is the number 2 paid streaming service, with about 2.6 per cent of downstream traffic (double what it was 18 months back). HBO Go was just 1 per cent of traffic.

But the arrival of new streaming content in the U.S. could tempt Canadians into the IP spoofing game. HBO Go is going to untether itself from cable in 2015, offering an Over The Top service (which means you can just log in and watch almost any device). Also going OTT in 2015 is CBS All Access ($6 a month) and just announced Sling TV (a $20 a month collection of cable channels including ESPN from the Dish Network). There’s already Hulu Plus ($8 in the U.S. featuring TV content from Comcast, Fox and Disney) and blacked-out-in Canada streaming sports like MLB.tv.

So-called cordcutters who ditch cable or satellite TV subscriptions and switch to streaming over the Internet (and maybe some free live TV from an HD antenna) typically describe themselves as frugal. They don’t want to overpay for a bunch of junk they don’t want. But the more OTT services there are out there the more the final price might start looking more like a traditional cable package.

Which leaves the content. The main argument for hiding your IP address from geoblocking streaming service is simple: People just want to watch something good on TV. Whether any of the copyright holders or service providers want to keep turning a blind eye is the question.

[PMC]

Inject some technical common sense into this...Netflix is a file server, they could deliver, rather than stream. The content is regulated by turf to satisfy the demands of copyright. The consumer isn't stealing anything by cross border shopping. The consumer is paying for an account, that is either valid or not, thus the gagets mentioned above, get sold. Why this is all perceived as theft or breaking rules is nonsense.

[jon]

There are several relevant legal precedents for this. SOCAN only collects for site visitors from Canada when charging Canadian web sites their fees. They expect the site owner to either geo-block foreign visitors or pay the RIAA and others for any U.S. visitors, and so on, for each country.

A Russian company that paid the Russian copyright fees for U.S. music, which is extremely small, lost a lawsuit against them by U.S. music companies claiming the fees they "should have" paid for each U.S. purchaser of music from the site.

The final example goes back to the early days of computer software, games, music, movies, etc. Canada Customs has seized imported Goods purchased overseas in jurisdictions where there was (at the time of seizure) no copyright law in place. Whether being sent by Mail or found in luggage at the airport.

As for Netflix offering downloads instead of streaming, they originally adopted the streaming model for their first market, the U.S., where it is much more expensive to buy the rights for Downloading than it is for Streaming.

To paraphrase the old Perry Mason line: "Although Truth is a valid legal defense against a charge of Slander, Technical Common Sense is not a valid argument against Intellectual Property Rights."

[PMC]

I will stand by my technical common sense argument.

If a u.s. customer has an account at a canuck website and he is listening to Bryan Adams in concert, the website is collecting a fee from that customer, and paying the fee to socan. Why would the website need to pay the RIAA? Doesn't Socan share the wealth ?

If a canuck gets a subscription to a u.s. music service, the customer pays a fee, and the music service then pays the RIAA their pound of flesh. Why would the american website need to pay Socan ? Doesn't the RIAA share the wealth with the Canadian artist... perhaps the Canadian artist should answer that and not the consumer or government.

[jon]

That is the official answer I got from a SOCAN representative in 2007 when I was looking at running a site that included unscoped airchecks, i.e. - ones that included all the Music.

I must track each visitor and pay fees to the country where the visitor was connecting from (or geo-block visitors not from a country where I was paying fees). SOCAN insisted that I only pay them for visitors connecting from Canada.

The fellow said it was how the international copyright treaty was written.

[PMC]

The fellow said it was how the international copyright treaty was written.

They should go back to the drawing board..

If I setup a website that plays mexican/spanish/greek tunes in Canada, I am sure Socan would show up with their hand out, or a court order demanding payment