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Comment by RyanMcGreal | Hacker News Reader

In other news, the lawnmowing industry has successfully lobbied the state government to pass a groundbreaking law making it a criminal offence to loan your lawnmower to a neighbour. The practice of lawnmowersharing is claimed, according to an industry-funded study, to cost the industry $10 billion a year in lost revenue.

"Now that everyone who wants to enjoy a mowed lawn has to come clean and buy or rent their own lawnmower, we can finally put an end to the harmful piracy that has been driving the lawnmowing industry to the brink of collapse," said Dr. Lawrence Angelo, an industry spokesperson.

The barbecue industry is watching this closely as it attempts to secure passage of a law that would uphold barbecue terms-of-use restrictions preventing barbecue owners from flagrantly cooking food for dinner guests without a multi-user licence.

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Yeah, it's crazy!

Or what if, when you paid for a gym membership, they wouldn't let you lend your gym membership card to someone else so they could get in too? Or if you buy a parking permit for my car and they won't let you shift it to someone else's car when you're away? Or if you go to a buffet and get "all you can eat" and they won't let you give your food to three friends?

Oh wait, they already do that. In fact, pretty much any time you pay a membership fee for a "use this as much as you like" service, it's impossible and/or illegal to share your membership with other people. It's just common sense -- "all you can eat for a fixed price" business plans only work if you don't share.

The scenarios you're describing seem a lot more like libraries loaning out physical copies of books, each of which can only be used by one person at a time. I think loaning out your NetFlix password is more akin to cable theft than to loaning out physical objects. If you're giving out your password to all of your friends, you're basically acting as a content distributor.

Still, I see no reason why this needs to be a law. NetFlix terms of service should cover it.

If you're making that distinction, then "theft" is probably not the right word to use.

They're not stealing from the person who loaned them the password, but "theft" is definitely the right word.

Theft results in a perment loss. Tresspassing is probably much more apt.

But, from the perspective of the online services there is a simple real world analogy that actually happens. Having 10+ people live in the same rented appartment. The lanlord is being paid, but his costs are larger than a single renter due to an increased useage of the property. Still, netflix is probably not the proponents of this law it's all about the RIAA and MPAA who hate the idea of unlimited content on the cheap.

I don't want to split hairs, but if I steal cable for a month, the cable company permanently loses the money I should have paid for a month of cable. Just because they don't lose the 1s and 0s they're selling doesn't mean there's no permanent loss.

My apartment has a rental agreement about how many people are allowed to live there. If I break the agreement by allowing ten friends to live there I lose my apartment. If I loan my NetFlix password to ten friends, I see no reason why they shouldn't just terminate my account.

but you are making the mistake that you would have paid for the service if you did not pirate the cable.

I very clearly wrote should have paid, not would have paid.

I agree - should have paid. People will always try to extract the last ounce of value out of anything, businesses and individuals are guilty of this - I just don't like seeing businesses using their relative size advantage to gain a legal advantage over individuals.

There is a big difference between cable an netflix. With cable you could tap a wire and they could not notice your use sage without significant effort. With netflix they can drop any account that uses more IP's or bandwidth than they want. Basically every time they serve up content they get to decide is this a valid use of the service, and with a little IP tracking there is little to stop this.

PS: It's easy enough to say in the TOS, any account that has more than N IP's downloading movies at the same time get's blocked and it's password reset.

Don't Netflix servers block you from accessing content from different devices using same credentials simultaneously? That's pretty much a library situation.

You can stream on up to four devices at a time, depending on your plan.

I guess they assume it will be in the same household or family, but it certainly doesn't have to be the same IP.

FYI in the 1800s, the publishing industry tried to shut down public libraries by lobbying governments to make it illegal for people to read books without first paying for them.

Did they want to make it illegal for people to read books without paying for them, or did they want to make it illegal to loan them out? There's a world of difference, particularly now that we're extrapolating that to digital media.

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