Right Holders Seek to Stop Geographic Internet Address Masking

Not content with tackling Internet piracy it now looks as if some Copyright Holders want to stop people from accessing legal content in other countries by blocking services that allow you to go online via the Internet address (IP) of a different location (e.g. such as when you use a VPN to view UK online TV content from the USA). Satellite ISPs take note.

A large number of Internet services, such as Virtual Private Networks (VPN) or Proxy Servers, allow people to adopt the IP address of a different country. This is a particularly useful feature for some EU Satellite ISPs that would otherwise inadvertently restrict UK subscribers from services, such as the BBC’s iPlayer, if they didn’t deploy a service to give people the correct geographic address.

Similarly people in Iceland have no access to the likes of Hulu, Netflix or iTunes because, due to stringent copyright laws, Apple in all their wisdom have decided that hundreds of thousands of potentially paying subscribers should not be allowed access to their legal music and video content via local distribution (i.e. a good way to fuel piracy).

As a result Tal, an Icelandic telecoms company, decided to solve this problem by launching a service (Luxusnet) that allowed subscribers in Iceland to choose the IP address of another country (e.g. they could pick a UK IP and then use that to access iTunes in the UK via Iceland). But the Association of Film Rights-Holders of Iceland (SMÁÍS) claim that such geo-blocking measures break copyright protections and are thus illegal under local law. Meanwhile the ISP stated that the choice to access foreign content was the subscribers responsibility.

Snæbjörn Steingrímsson, SMÁÍS General Manager, said (TorrentFreak):

“This argument does not hold, either morally or legally, in our opinion. In fact, we hear this exact same argument about torrent-sites. This is like saying people can buy contraband goods legally as long as they come to this country legally. There is no commercial or other economic activity in Iceland that could survive against such competition.”

In fairness we can see the need to be very careful when protecting copyright material, especially given the complexity of international distribution rights. Never the less in this case it seems likely to do far more harm, through the broad encouragement of piracy, by failing to develop new business models as a solution.

Similarly it’s also true to say that such services, depending upon how they’re implemented, can be used to mask the identity of an Internet user and thus offer some encouragement to online pirates.

Clearly people in Iceland want to use and pay for those services so why not make it available to them instead of forcing people down the very path that so many Rights Holders seek to discourage. Surely it is better to feed such demand by developing new ways to meet it.