visa, mastercard, geoblock crackdown., page-14

DD, we have discussed this on the QFX thread before for those who have been aorund long enough to remember - Netflix is legally bound by their agreement/contract with content providers to not permitted viewing of content outside of their geographical license.

There is a reason for geo-blocking - Imagine the money the content provider are loosing should alot of people access netflix from outside US region or region to which netflix has no license to distribute. Netflix would be making more money from their existing US license and the content providers will not have this. If Netflix does not find ways to prevent this then they could potentially be sued, their license cancelled which would be a blow to their superior content offering..so

I reckon the crack down is driven by Netflix because of this legal requirement to prevent access from unlicense regions. There was an article some time ago 2011 that explained this however i cannot find it now but here is something more recent.

- One difficulty could potentially arise, because technically, under US law, violating the terms of service for a website could be considered a crime in the United States.

When ZDNet inquired as to whether Choice had obtained legal advice on whether it can advocate the practice, a spokesperson pointed to comments from then-Attorney-General Robert McClelland in 2011, who said it did not appear to violate copyright law in Australia.

IT lawyer for IDEALAW Matt Phipps told ZDNet that under Australian law, although the streaming of the content would not be in violation of copyright law, breaching the terms of use to access a streaming site could be considered a crime.

"Many streaming or IPTV sites ban you from using a VPN in their terms of use, which is the contract you enter when you sign up to that streaming site," he said. "Breaching those terms of use can be enough to get your account blocked, often without a refund. The site owner may also sue you."

The courts in Australia have yet to test a case such as this, but there are parts of Australian legislation that content owners could potentially rely on if they decide to attempt to stop Australians from accessing Netflix and other streaming services that are geo-blocked in Australia.

"There are a few ways that breaching terms of use to access a streaming site — or any site, for that matter — could be a crime [under] sections from the Commonwealth Criminal Code Act 1995."

Section 474.7 outlines that a person could face two years' imprisonment for modifying a telecommunications device identifier, while under Section 476.2, a person could be charged with having unauthorised access to data. Under Section 478.1, a person could be charged with having unauthorised access to restricted data through bypassing an "access control system", which could potentially include geo-blocking.