UK Gov Says Password Sharing on Streaming Services is Illegal UPDATE2

The UK Government’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) announced an interesting new campaign in partnership with Meta yesterday, which among other things decided to label “password sharing on streaming services [e.g. Netflix, Amazon Prime etc.] … without paying a subscription” as breaking copyright law. That’s a lot of new criminals.

The new anti-online piracy guidance states: “Piracy is a major issue for the entertainment and creative industries. Pasting internet images into your social media, password sharing on streaming services and accessing the latest films, tv series or live sports events through kodi boxes, fire sticks or Apps without paying a subscription all break copyright law. Not only are you breaking the law but stopping someone earning a living from their hard work.”

The news that casually sharing your paid Netflix, NOW TV, Disney+ or other password with somebody else is now effectively a criminal offence will probably come as quite a shock to most people, particularly since the act has become somewhat normalized in recent years and is even credited with helping the streaming industry to grow. Nevertheless, the IPO doesn’t mince words on the subject.

A spokesperson for the IPO said (TorrentFreak):

“There are a range of provisions in criminal and civil law which may be applicable in the case of password sharing where the intent is to allow a user to access copyright protected works without payment. These provisions may include breach of contractual terms, fraud or secondary copyright infringement depending on the circumstances.”

Firstly, let’s be clear about something here, most online streaming services actually support some degree of password sharing in their terms, albeit usually limited to those residing within your “household” (i.e. to support family viewing).

However, handing your password out to people you don’t live with is often another matter, although extrapolating that (e.g. Netflix merely describes this activity as being “unauthorized” or “not allowed“) to something that is overtly “illegal” and a “potential crime” seems like a very low bar to be setting for criminality (it’s more likely to just be unlawful – a civil matter).

The goal here is clearly one of deterrence, since any streaming provider taking court action, or even police action to arrest people, for sharing a streaming password seems likely to result in a large-scale political and PR disaster.

On the other hand, we’ve seen in the past how “law firms” of dubious repute are willing to exploit anything that could earn them a bit of extra money, even when the evidence base is incredibly weak (e.g. speculative invoicing for alleged cases of internet copyright infringement). The latter point about evidence will be key here too, since it’s not at all easy to prove that somebody is abusing password sharing.

The streaming services could of course clampdown further on this themselves. But they don’t because that would make it much harder to access the content you’ve paid for while outside your home (e.g. watching that Netflix episode on the train via a different mobile or public WiFi network etc.).

As a side note, the IPO also seems to be going after “pasting internet images into your social media“, so at this point almost everybody in the UK is pretty screwed 🙂 .

UPDATE 3:09pm

The government appears to have updated the offending paragraph to remove any mention of password sharing, although they haven’t yet retracted the supporting comment they issued to TF. On top of that, they’ve added some extra text after “Pasting internet images into your social media” to caveat that this only applies when doing so “without permission“. Phew!

The new text reads: “Piracy is a major issue for the entertainment and creative industries. Pasting internet images into your social media without permission, or accessing films, tv series or live sports events through Kodi boxes, hacked Fire Sticks or apps without paying a subscription is an infringement of copyright and you may be committing a crime.”

UPDATE 22nd Dec

Despite the IPO editing the original text, they’re officially still sticking to their line in the comment that password sharing is potentially both a criminal and civil matter. This begs the question, why remove the original reference to password sharing at all? The IPO is sending a very confusing message with all this, which continues to differ from what streaming providers say.