Netflix to block proxy access to content not available locally

When I don't just plug the damn laptop in, I tend to just connect through VPN and despite the fact that it slows my connection down considerably, I can stream any of the shows I've paid for through Popcorn Time or any other streaming torrent client. A typical hour-long episode is usually finished downloading within the first few minutes of the show and it's all accessible in a single interface.

My personal dream is that Comcast or one of these awful companies decides that they need to do a better job of pleasing customers and starts offering a legal PopcornTime/Netflix-style web interface to browse and stream all of the content you're already paying for. That is something I would actually want to subscribe to.

Instead I pay, rarely torrent anything I don't have legal access to, and stream/download illegally just because it's easier and works better. I haven't gone as far as some friends who set up auto-downloaders for usenet or torrents so they always have the latest episodes sitting on their NAS as soon as they go up. But I've considered it.

1. The client you use doesn't matter a bit.

2. Encrypting the traffic helps if an ISP is actively looking for torrenting, but they rarely do this. In fact, I suspect residential ISPs (Time Warner, Verizon, Comcast) absolutely never do this; university and corporate network administrators might. In part because it's very time and effort consuming for them, but mostly because lots of people torrent perfectly legal things. People get caught because the MPAA, and other organizations, contract firms to write scripts and bots to crawl sites and hunt for as many trackers as possible, then monitor trackers and record all peers observed if they find a file that matches content they own. Encryption won't do anything there. You can't encrypt your IP address from a peer, obviously.

3. When you do it makes little difference. Your odds of getting caught may be a little higher in the first few days, but many people still get caught several years later. The cost of keeping these scripts on these trackers is merely the cost of a little bandwidth and electricity for them. They have no reason not to sit on a tracker forever.

4. You have it completely backwards. It's the "mafiaa" who send the logs of what they found to your ISP. Then your ISP notifies you of the report they received. They don't require any info from the ISP (unless they decide to later file a lawsuit and want the subscriber's personal information). The burden of proof is on them to give what they have to your ISP.

I've dealt with many of these cases from the perspective of the ISP. None of these are secrets. Using a VPN to do something illegal is not remotely "tinfoil hat".

Just use a VPN or a tracker you're reasonably sure their bots can't find. That's it. It's easy. When you torrent, your goal is to hide from other peers of the torrent, not to hide from your ISP.

1. QOS on the router, set a lower priority for the ports torrents use 2. Set a bandwidth limit in your torrent client 3. Use a queue / batch system to have them download at 3AM or whatever.

Streaming allows for instant start and adaptive bandwidth. Downloading means you can play it in whatever way you want, watch just the scenes you like, etc.

Netflix has a great UI for simple watching or you can use a full featured player and tweak lots of settings.

Also there are plenty of ways to play anything on a TV (smart tv with usb drive, network share, chromecast, htpc software, dlna) and you can use settings in your torrent client to limit the download speed if necessary. Some clients even let you torrent the file sequentially so you can start playing/streaming it before it's all finished.

You may have results like this, but I would guess that you're in the minority.

For me personally, well seeded 6-8GB movie takes an hour at most, usually less. I can still play online games, watch other streams online, browse, etc. and with other people using the same internet connection in the house doing the same things, and not have any noticeable slowdown. Full 1080p with AAC or DTS audio seems like higher quality to me than what Netflix provides.

The only upside Netflix has is the instant streaming, but if you're patient and can wait a bit for some downloads, or maybe run them at night or while at work, then this is a non-issue. Also you can just connect a TV to your computer.

I'm uploading 2 torrents right now at almost a megabit and my internet is just fine.

When there are good seeders I can pull 8 down. Most movies and shows are done in minutes.

No noticeable degradation to browsing speed, when a large file finishes there can be a little slowdown, but that's a different thing.

Or, you can just get a seedbox or VPS with a decent connection close enough to you that you can stream off it. The torrent will be done near instantaneously, and you'll be able to stream in higher quality than Netflix. You can stream full 1080P MKVs at <20Mbps.

Use private trackers as they're much better seeded, as well as the more obvious benefits.

And with a bit of extra work (very little, really) you can have a ridiculously nice torrenting setup. I can just add a movie to my IMDb watchlist and it will be on my TV in 15 minutes. And 10GB+ h264 Blu-ray encodes are much better quality than Netflix streaming (I can't vouch for their 4k streams, but I reckon they're still much lower bitrate).

Expect more of that in the future.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1PCtIaM_GQ

Ugh, I hate them. Specially when they aren't set to last a specific time and are there the whole video. I instantly deactivate them when I see them.

Well, at least I do on occasion. When the kids are watching Netflix cartoons on the living room TV, I can just open up Firefox and watch another show on my (Linux) PC.

I suspect most people won't use it, but I'm glad to have this option.

If that works for you then great, but there's obviously much more control available when you have the full file and your own player.

That threw me for a second. "What would DHCP have to do with HDMI?". Clearly you must have meant HDCP, which I suspect is what the GP was referring to.

is a different statement than

"piracy is a problem"

Blocking things geographically didn't work in socialist times before 1990 and expecting it to work now is rather naive :/

And if they really want to do illicit or unethical things, they still do it (and justify it) as long as they don't think they will get caught.

This is one reason looting happens during a disaster. This is why people cheat on their taxes.

I expect and tolerate a certain level of lawbreaking from teens and pre-"settling down" young adults.

Categorically, I put piracy somewhere among underage drinking, using soft drugs, and irresponsible vehicle operation. The pettiest of petty crime. Do those boggle your mind too?

I don't expect anyone to inherently respect IP law in the portions of their life where they're broke. Unless someone close to them makes money off of copywritten material.

Keep in mind this is perhaps one of the few cases were you aren't totally powerless.

If you make something that people want, then make it hard to get legally, alternatives will be found.

Region locking spurs piracy, it doesn't hinder it.

If anything, this should push production houses to work better with rights distribution. In India, that's already happening with "Premier" channels which run seasons alongside US counterparts. For shows that appear on now Premier channels, I have not torrented a single one. I am also sure that if not for rampant torrenting, this would have never happened.

Internet is a great leveller. Take a deep breath, let it in. By the time we all have gray hair, this will be long sorted out. You can't lock down IP by country in 2016. If you built a system that loses money if it leaks internationally, it's your fault. Next, try to build a business model that has more chances of survival than chances of sand retaining in your fist.

The real problem is that people still expect a century old business model to work. If it doesn't, they lose their minds.

If a tree falls in another part of the world, and nobody saw it, nobody visited that forest for 10 years, nobody wanted to use that wood, did it really fall? Did American oak planters lose money because of it?

if it's not otherwise available then how is pirating not 100% harmless?

Publishers should be aware at this point that they can either start dropping barriers to content access or people will just find another way.

If I'm willing to pay you for it, why can't I have it? What reason is there to deny me the ability to access culture if I'm willing to pay?

Is it because I was (without any choice of mine) born in the wrong country?

Am I entitled for being born in the wrong country? That sounds more like snobbery from people born in the "right" country.

After doing all that, if they expect a group (e.g. a non-US country, or students who can't afford cable) to stop participating in the bought-and-paid-for culture that can't be avoided, that group will find a way to participate anyway.

It's not entitlement to want to be able to participate in the dominant cultural trends (made dominant by consolidation and advertising).

Somehow I'm having a bit of difficulty empathizing with the law here.

People perform any number of mental gymnastics in order to justify their own interests. I'm reading A Struggle for Power right now and the 10 years before the American Revolution was basically one long exercise in mental gymnastics by both sides.

We act on our interests and justify them post facto.

Hollywood along with every other major content producer has a marketing reach which is global. If people in these countries did not want to see the new Star Wars or listen to the latest American pop star it means that the marketing sucks! So what you are imaging is a world where the content producers are basically telling their potential audience to go F themselves.

There are underlying moral issues to this story. The first is censorship and blocking access to certain groups of IP blocks. Clearly this is getting written in to content licensing contracts and that's too bad. If an IP address is not doing something hostile it should not be blocked. The second involves asking extremely poor people for more money. Someone that makes $190 a month just isn't going to be paying the US market rate to consume content nor should they - and that absolutely is different than getting a below market or price subsidized physical product or item.

But you should consider that my experience is most people view the idea that some for-profit entity owns culture or can tell them that it's immoral to share media with each other to be laughable.

Like if HN decided that any criticism of products posted here was unacceptable and someone called those who still posted constructive criticism "entitled".

I'm not saying it's that simple, but understanding the viewpoint will help you understand what's going on.

I'm trying to think of a time when people were not happy to consume whatever content was available to them. The history of media technology has been the history of people duplicating works other people wished they wouldn't. Historically many famous authors had their copyrights ignored an unauthorized works distributed.

> go through whatever means necessary

That's a melodramatic way of describing "google it, click the first likely result, click a button, wait a few minutes".

> it boggles my mind how comfortably everybody seems able to justify it

In this case we're talking about people not being allowed to purchase content. This isn't a dirty hippy waving an "information wants to be free" sign, it's a frustrated professional being told their money is no good if they want to watch the new Game of Thrones season everyone is talking about. I'm not saying they're right, but it's not hard to see how they're able to internally justify it.

I'm currently in a small non-US country, and I have a US netflix subscription that goes through a proxy, which my girlfriend, in particular, adores. If Netflix forces us onto the very mediocre local version, my girlfriend will be upset. And she's going to torrent the shows she wanted to watch so she can follow the developments and talk about them with her friends in the states. Does that boggle your mind? Is the a terrible entitled person? Maybe. But I think it's pretty universal.

Why is it entitled to work around discriminatory behaviour based on country of origin?

If I went to your physical store and you said "Sorry, no Mexicans, we only sell to American residents" I wouldn't have any issue getting the products through another channel.

In fact hopefully my actions will help ruin any attempt at making a profit by engaging in such scummy discrimination and so I actually have a moral imperative to get the products through another channel.

Let's just throw the legalistic argument out in advance. It holds as much weight in people's minds as the speed limit does.

Availability is part of it yes.

Another part of it is respect, and the media industry has a systemic problem with showing any to its paying customers. Those in charge have yet to realize that all the DRM, all these systems serve to inconvenience people who want to give them money in the first place - and I think the idea that people can be chided into giving due deference to the whims of huge corporations when said corporations won't even do something as simple as sell usable product, is just a bit backwards.

Yet another part of it is practicality, and XKCD says it better than I can: https://xkcd.com/488/

People been smuggling English bands on vinyl into the USSR and making their own copies "on the bones" last time when vinyl was big (and so was the USSR). So I suggest that maybe 50 years ago?

Is that discrimination the worst thing in the world in the context of entertainment media? No. But then again, neither is the resultant piracy of the media in the first place. Swings and roundabouts, both sides are at fault here; there is no particular moral imbalance in favour of the distributors.

It is easy

There is virtually no way to get caught, only a few out of probably millions do and if you buy a VPN that number drops to virtually zero.

It is easy to justify that you are not really stealing, because one you can't practically buy the thing and two you are not taking anything from the publisher.

Of course there are also those who fundamentally don't believe in copyright being a valid agreement, at least in its current form. I count myself weakly in the last group, in that I think music and movies should be subject to a compulsory streaming license - the producers gets paid for each view, but they do not get to choose who can watch when or where.

The right to participate in local culture (and thanks to the Internet, local often equals to global) is something core to society. Thinking you can prevent people from exercising that right is being entitled.

Do you think your government should determine what you, as an adult, should be allowed to watch? Do you think a government should be able to block certain works for religious reasons?

Often, at the price and availability that is legally provided, I simply am not going to pay. At that point, the question is whether I get to consume it at all and they gain a potential fan and future customer, or I don't.

In this day and age it doesn't make sense for me to buy an indie album not available on a streaming service without already knowing that I like it. If I did that every time I wanted to listen to something, I'd be out of money. Nor am I going to drop $40+ just to watch a single season of a TV show. Once my money is out of the equation, everyone loses by me not consuming anyway.

Blu-rays are expensive, less portable, and require specialized hardware.

As somebody from a "2nd world & irrelevant" country (Czech Republic, we are in the EU), the situation is:

* Netflix launched here with the global launch, not even Netflix' own shows are fully on Netflix, because Netflix licensed them to the local TV channels;

* Hulu is not available outside the US (it says so when I go there);

* Amazon TV, iTunes do not operate here;

* there are local "TV streaming" competitors but they usually only have Czech (i.e. bad) TV shows.

I believe this is a situation common in many of the countries where Netflix recently launched -- and that was the complaint that started this thread.

For reference I believe this to be stupid, but that's where this fabled profit lies.

I understand other entities likely hold the rights in his area than the ones allowing Netflix to sell content in the US.

Analogies only go so far, but it's more like he tried to pay for a Hilton room in Elbonia, and Hilton said "No f'ing way we allow franchises in Elbonia", so he paid for a Motel6 and then went and slept for free in an abandoned building where someone had illegally written Hilton above the door. Yes, Hilton's intellectual property rights are being violated, but he's not incurring direct costs upon Hilton, and he did give first offer to Hilton. Hilton is losing opportunity cost, but it's hard to blame the person who tried to pay them.

That being said, Motel6 gave him the key to the Hilton, he just had to walk over and use it