But⌠we already get to watch Doctor Who at the time it airs in the UK! ABC has been playing the episode at some ridiculous time of a Sunday morning, and then hosting it on ABC iView to be accessed, for free, at any time for several days after.
I agree that more international content available AT THE SAME TIME as airing in the US or UK would be awesome, but Doctor Who is not a good example, because we even beat the US to this one!
[quote=âeditormum75, post:2, topic:40801â]
I agree that more international content available AT THE SAME TIME as airing in the US or UK would be awesome,[/quote]
Thatâd be great. 
Given Australian TVâs previous form, I still donât entirely trust them not to fuck up TV series. They are getting better, though. And there was a nice strap-line on a trailer for the new season of South Park on SBS - âWe download it so you donât have to!â
â⌠that the families of people accused of watching TV the wrong way should be disconnected from the Internet.â
Thereâs a wrong way to watch television? tries to imagine it
Ow! I think I broke something
This is why most Australianâs donât give a toss about copyright law, at least as far as TV goes.
Three letters: SSH.
Its a perfectly legal and legitimate application for remote server administration. It is 100% encrypted. You can tunnel anything you want within this encrypted channel, including (for instance) an openvpn connection.
Obviously people using âfor hireâ âVPNâ services might be detectable, but you arenât going to detect people sshing to or from their own private servers.
Sorry, the Internet is meant to break down geographic barriers - where someone is DOES NOT and SHOULD NOT matter. BBCâs failing means of restriction where people can be to view its site be damned.
Is this a new thing, or in the beebâs blood? They do come from a country where they are presumptively entitled to a fee for any device with a TV tuner, without any particular need to demonstrate what the tuner is being used to watchâŚ
Coming from that background, their current proposal looks practically liberal.
Earlier today I had a virtual meeting to demo some software we are developing. This included logging onto our VPN and watching video and screencasts from our Australian client. For every instance of âpirates, pirates!â, I suspect there is a hundred-fold instances of legitimate use. Seriously, screw these myopic people and their limited understanding of what the Internet is and does.
In England, fully 10% of all magistrate court cases (the lowest criminal court) are the BBC bringing private prosecutions under criminal law, prosecuting private citizens for allegedly watching TV without a license. About 200,000 people a year are summonsed to court. We eventually put about 50 people a year in jail for contempt of court related to television offences at the behest of the BBC.
This results in sublimely absurd letters from the âcustomer serviceâ division of the BBC; variously threatening to search your house for unlicensed televisions, a combined âguilty plea & license fee application formâ whereby your application for a TV license contains a section which is a court-admissible signed confession that you were guilty of the criminal act of unlicensed TV watching prior to your application, and you proffer the license fee in the hope that the BBC in their great magnanimousity will drop the charges against you.
tl;dr Fuck the BBCâs views on copyright
Dr Who is broadcast in standard-def on ABC. It is available as video on demand via ABC iview at an even lower resolution.
High-def broadcasting in Oz is frustratingly rare so there will still be people looking for quality through VPN to avoid geo-blocking. This is not the same category of behaviour as pirating and shouldnât be illegal.
Years ago I bought The Sopranos DVDs from the US rather than the Oz version because the US version was 16:9 with commentary vs. 4:3 without. Same type of behaviour as now really and it wasnât illegal then.
Back in the 1990s, VPNs were still research tech and part of the crypto rights civil liberties movement and a cypherpunky thing to work on.
By the early 2000s, VPNs were a tool I used to telecommute to work. Now that itâs the mid-2010s, my phone has several different flavors of VPNs that it uses for different applications, as well as my laptop having them.
If the Beeb wants to start calling VPN users âpiratesâ, then a couple of large US phone companies are going to start saying things about âYarr!â at them**, plus weâre going to have to bill them for the petrol our UK and European workers will need to use to start commuting to our US HQ offices.
** (Thatâs my personal opinion, not the official corporate position of my employers at $DAYJOB)
I found the actual doc (doc download) that they sent to the Aussie Govât. They are so incredibly unhelpful. According to them:
It is reasonable for ISPs to be placed under an obligation to identify user behaviour that is âsuspiciousâ and indicative of a user engaging in conduct that infringes copyright. Such behaviour may include the illegitimate use by internet users of IP obfuscation tools in combination with high download volumes. The determination of what an âillegitimateâ use of such tools is, and the threshold of what would be considered a âhighâ download volume over a period of time, would need to take into account legitimate explanations in order to avoid false positives and to safeguard the fundamental rights of consumers â such matters would be open to further industry discussion and agreement.
No, that wonât prove to be a problem at all. Gads.
This is what they had to say about other ways to handle the issue.
Other Approaches
9 . Are there alternative measures to reduce online copyright infringement that may be more effective?
Yes, alternate measures do exist, however BBC Worldwide is of the view that the measures proposed by the Government strike a balance between ISPs and rights holders. Any alternative measures would be supplementary to the proposed new regime. At a high level, BBC Worldwide considers it important to provide for a toolkit of enforcement measures, to effectively tackle the different types of online copyright infringement.
They just really, really want some people paying fines.
I have often said the the BBC is one of the worst examples of a company that engenders piracy. They do it in so many ways, and then they whine about it happening over and over again - even though people tell them theyâre the ones who need to change.
They really donât want to change, and I think part of that is what it could mean for the TV License. After all, if British viewers got their media at the same time as international viewers, theyâd be losing one of the âhome teamâ benefits. I believe (and have for some time) that their âeek! a pirate!â behavior is all about them trying to capitalize on the international market without losing any funding from home.
Avast! I be required by me employer to use a VPN to work from home, me hearties!
Oooh, sounds like someone who should be paying their ISP for a âbusinessâ line.
Itâs almost certainly worse than myopia: for every person who simply doesnât understand the potential, thereâs a better paid one who is willing to wait for somebody to develop the potential for them, and then slice it, dice it, and charge extra for it.
Because of the utility of VPNs, including data-heavy ones, Iâd be virtually certain that there will be internet connections available where such traffic will be treated with courtesy and an SLA. TheyâŚjust wonât be the cheap ones. However, everyone loves a little market segmentation, and âlegitimateâ VPN users are clearly catered to, so what could possibly be wrong, the oh-so-smarmy defenders of the idea will askâŚ
but you are probably not slurping up gigabuts of data per day.
Fuck the BBC full stop. Their craven toadying to Cameron and his pals has killed off any last respect I had for them.
Any mentions of consumer rights in there?
This phrase makes my head hurt. What does âillegitimate useâ even mean (in plain language, as opposed to corporate newspeak)? Are thieves and robbers âillegitimate usersâ of oxygen? Are getaway drivers âillegitimate usersâ of petrol?
in a way this reminds me of all of those âmunicipalitiesâ around st. louis county that rely on fines and court costs for 40% of their funding. wow!
I should also point out that BBC Worldwide have just launched a channel on Foxtel where most of the BBCâs first-run programming will be shown. (Doctor Who on the FTA ABC is about the only exception to this deal, as far as I know.)
Foxtel is half owned by Murdoch. Strange bedfellowsâŚ
The whole thing is bloominâ stupid. When I was working in film and television, it was a requirement that connectivity between us (a post-production/VFX studio) and the clients were using over a VPN. We transferred large amounts of data, as you can imagine. And many of those endpoints were sent over public ISPs, not specialist media ISPs like Sohonet. Which is the whole point of VPNs.
Perhaps broadcasters and studios should get their own houses in order when it comes to piracy before they start trying to put the blame on others and having other people and organisations trying to second guess everything.
