A certain amount of password sharing has been condoned by Netflix, and they’re now taking that away - users are understandably upset because they’ve become used to that feature of the service. But even if there was similarity to piracy, the argument wouldn’t carry much weight with those of us who don’t consider piracy to be a moral issue.
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And it’s not just the removing of the password sharing per se. It completely destroys some use cases that aren’t even piracy adjacent. Business travel, child custody, vacations are just the ones that come immediately to mind.
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Cory wrote an article about this back in February.
He points out that the Netflix definition of a Household is relatively rigid. That any attempt to define a standard household will run into all kinds of perfectly valid scenarios that are outside the definition. That they’ll occur way more often than some would think.
Changes like this will tend to create more issues and difficultly for people using the service in completely normal ways.
For instance, I watch Netflix on my iPad or iPhone only when I’m not at home. Unless Netflix is spying on my device to see if I ever or frequently use the same network as my TV or tracking it is in that location frequently, how will know that this is my phone and not may father’s phone? They’ll say something like, “just use Netflix now and then while you are at home”. But, what happens when I forget and then travel? Does it reject me? This a completely allowed and advertised use case that it is going to make harder for me and fail to work on occasion because I didn’t jump through some hoop to prove an arbitrary definition of a household and that I’m me. Even worse, it is going to fail when I am least able to correct it for the longest duration.
If I’m looking for silver linings here, now I know what to get my father, who uses my account, for Christmas every year. Instead of some gift he hasn’t already bought himself, I can just put a note about the extra Netflix account in a card and be done.
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They already charge you based on X number of simultaneous streams. Why do they care if my daughter is streaming while at home or away at college?
Well, I know why, it just doesn’t seem fair/kosher/whatever.
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Anyone know if there a version that’s not behind The Atlantic’s paywall?
I find I only watch a couple movies each month and TV series end up being infrequently watched. So while I’ve been a subscriber since the early days of physical DVD’s with Netflix I ended up cancelling all my video streaming services. Summer gets so busy I figured I’d wait till next winter and see if it’s bothering me not having streaming. For as infrequently as I watch movies I can just do a 1 off rental of the actual movie I want to watch a couple times a month and still come out ahead of what I was paying for 4-5 streaming services. I did keep Spotify, because I have music playing almost all the time at work and home and it’s the one service that I would instantly miss.
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I’m going to have to VPN myself into my family’s LAN every once in a while, it seems?
I mean, it IS called family account, isn’t it?
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I suspect that this question is mostly theoretical given the relatively tiny scale of the damages that one could reasonably claim arise from a netflix-related dispute; but this move makes me curious about how the process works more generally, since there definitely would be contexts where the numbers involved would be vastly larger:
If you terminate a contract with someone, or invoke a penalty clause, on the basis of the assertion that they violated the terms of the contract what’s the situation in terms of standard of evidence, expected level of reasonableness, the other party disputing your claim of breach and demanding redress for the disruption?
Netflix’s case is presumably going to be rather atypical in that it’s going to involve a very large number of such terminations or penalties based on claims of violation, with very low individual value; but the case of someone seeking to terminate a contract or invoke a penalty clause based on their claim that the other party is violating the contract can’t be especially novel; and must have cropped up in the context of some much, much, more valuable contracts, much bigger penalties; or situations where the sorts of contractual breach being alleged are much less innocent than password sharing; and the assertion that someone is a contract-violator is probably commercially damaging defamation.
Is there no particular customary standard; just the feedback provided by wild nonsense being easier to rebut than reasonable but not certain claims? Some convention on what claims of contract violation are sufficiently reasonable, in light of inevitably imperfect information, that making them doesn’t suggest bad faith or recklessness; even if you turn out to be incorrect; while others are deemed unreasonable or implausible enough that only the claim being suitably proven would stop the accused party from not only demanding that you reverse whatever you did based on the claim; but be treated as acting recklessly or in bad faith for making accusations on such flimsy grounds?
Again, I’m not expecting this to be much of a test case in the genre; just because the numbers are so low and the accusation of netflix-sharing so unlikely to be seen as actually defamatory; but in principle the question of one party terminating a contract with another based on the results of a set of internal heuristics they are loathe to disclose publicly seems like a thing that contract law would have something to say about.
The article might be on Cory’s pluralistic website.
Try this one:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes
I’m not sure if it’s the exact same or just similar. I remembered reading about the topic from Cory and then googled “doctorow define household” to find it. That’s where the Atlantic article was the first hit. Digging deeper finds a Twitter thread and the Pluralistic post, plus a Medium article.
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Archive.ph is your friend. You can unpaywall archive anything you want and saves others doing it for you:
https://archive.ph/pIAep
Edit: just read it myself, and it’s a great piece. Really summarizes this problem well. Doctorow at his best.
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Thank you!
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Fantastic - so useful, appreciate you sharing the information.
Cancelling now.
This part bothers me.
Family doesn’t mean household.
If they want it to only count for the household they need to stop using the word “family” in promotional materials rather than try to redefine the term.
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But when I pay for my Netflix, I’m paying to be able to stream on one screen at a time for the whole month. Why does it matter what screen that is at any given time? I don’t get money back if I’m not streaming at any given time.
I feel like your analogy is akin to calling it piracy if I let someone else into my house to watch cable tv when I’m not there. I’ve paid for the service, what business is it of theirs who I let watch it?
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Doesn’t matter if you are there or not. They would like that additional person to pay.
I’m sure they would! 
The more I thought of the analogy the more it fell apart. With cable tv, the cable companies actually had to maintain the infrastructure, but Netflix and other streaming services are piggy-backing on the internet/broadband infrastructure, so their claims of “theft” in this regard just seem way, way off.
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I doubt most people who share their password are paying for the single screen plan.
The easiest way for them to have addressed password sharing would be to charge per screen allowed with a flat fee. 4 active screens is twice the cost of 1. I think people would complain even louder if Netflix decided that their 4 screen package now was $40 instead of $20.
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