HBO cracks down on paying VPN “pirates” | Hacker News Reader

HBO cracks down on paying VPN “pirates”

torrentfreak.com

20 pointsamelius11 comments

This is like the lawyer version of my old summer job in high school. We had to fix any computer problems, but if there weren't any computer problems we might get asked to do anything -- rake leaves, pick up trash, whatever.

As a consequence, there were always computer problems.

This is like the same thing. All popular HBO content is ubiquitously available, from thousands of places, for free. I live in Japan, so I could never pay HBO for it until recently.

Then they came out with their new HBO Now thing, and I figured, "Fine, John Oliver is the most important newsman in the world, I will give them a shot (even though I suspect it will end up not working out)."

So I signed up through iTunes, confirmed that HBO Now was, as expected, a broken piece of shit that didn't work outside of the US, and then signed up for one of these VPN services. This makes their service $5/mo. more expensive for me, but they are now getting $180 a year as opposed to nothing.

And yet, they just seem hellbent on going back to nothing.

Literally ANYBODY who is willing and capable of signing up for a VPN service to access the content is also capable of just getting the same content for free on the interweb tubes. The vanishingly tiny minority of people who still have ethical qualms about doing so -- despite HBO essentially telling them, Fuck off, you don't get to watch! -- can't possibly amount to any significant business.

The behavior doesn't make any sense at all, unless you think about a bunch of lawyers acting like high school kids sneakily disconnecting cables to avoid raking leaves.

You know that developer who wants to refractor the entire code base, upgrade to a new database, and otherwise move the entire code base to this side of 2010 even though the savings don't have a chance of nearing the costs.

I'm envisioning that same type of person working as a lawyer instead.

I'd love to pay for BBC as well, but they will not let me do it, so we pirate. Years ago we got a response about "overseas partners" being the stewards of their BBC brand and programs outside the UK, so they won't just let us buy BBC streaming or downloadable shows (even with DRM). The 'overseas partners' were/are primarily "BBC America" and various PBS channels.

These partners must be paying a HUGE amount for a handful of old programs, because to pass up streaming fees direct from consumers ... I'd just imagine the income would be much larger than selling to PBS stations. And hey, btw, I'd like Eastenders to be current, not 9 years behind what's happening now. My PBS station is 9 years behind, and apparently paying top dollar for that privilege. And 70+ hours a week of "changing rooms" reruns (which was happening in 2005 on BBC America) is insane.

Country-specific content deals will eventually die, but these last death throes are just painful to sit through.

Why doesn't the HBO letter provide information about acceptable-to-them methods of paying for their content?

I understand that geo-blocking is normal (although I loathe it) but if you're a company that wants to "protect publishing deals in my country" part of that is telling me how to buy your content in my country. After all, if I'm paying for a VPN and paying for your service I've shown some commitment - financial and technical - to being your customer.

While I agree with you completely the truth is they don't care if you are their customer (individually or as a group).

They deal with such large numbers that you in particular are less than a rounding error. While they could provide streaming to you as a group that opens a whole case of worm cans regarding potential taxes, law suits, contract disputes, etc.

While we often think of how simple it is to do because we approach it from the tech side and we sometimes think of it from the business side we (self included) rarely think of it from the HUGE CORPORATE side, which is, they have better things to do.

Sadly, things are setup in a way that is not beneficial to us, the consumer.

Sure, but I'm not asking them to do that.

They sent out an email. Why didn't they include an url? That url would list countries and the providers in that country who provide HBO content; or it would list shows and then who provides those shows in what countries.

HBO still gets to block people outside the US, but also pushes those people to HBO content via official channels.

The legality of circumventing of geo-blocking is something of a grey area in Australia, although Communications Malcolm Turnbull has previously argued that using a VPN to access overseas content is not illegal under the Copyright Act.........The 2013 report of the parliamentary inquiry into IT pricing in Australia, which examined price discrimination, recommended that the Copyright Act be amended to explicitly support the right of consumers to employ anti-geo-blocking measures.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/573005/it-legal-use-...

According to the Australian government, employing anti-geo-blocking measures is implicitly legal.

I recommend staying off mass-market geo-blocking services and VPN's and use ones that rely some programming to achieve. Have not received the HBO email about cancelling my service due to proxying to US.

Living in Ireland and managed to get my hands on a 30 day trial using a VPN and iTunes account... wont be paying them if they don't want it though... They could have had my money... they wont now...

HBO continues to be stupid about business - if you take pains to cut of people that will pay you money, you are going to end up bankrupt.

They're just going to drive paying customers to torrent sites.

IANAL but this doesn't make much sense to me.

If you've already set up up a VPN client, why wouldn't you simply download torrents rather than directly funding hostile businesses that wish to destroy the Internet?

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