More to the point, with streaming, it's not really clear the user has made any copy that would be required for the violation in most jurisdictions. (In fact, it obviously doesn't apply everywhere, as some jurisdictions give complete waivers to copyright infringement for personal use.) Treaties like the TRIPS agreement extend copyright (and other IP) rules and enforcement to foreign jurisdictions, but it's not altogether clear that TRIPS would require every jurisdiction to prosecute someone who receives a stream from Netflix through an additional hop. 'Piracy' isn't a well defined legal term, so I'm guessing we're talking about copyright infringement here.īut US copyright primarily extends from US laws, which are hard to break if you're in a foreign jurisdiction.

> You are aware that watching netflix outside of it's service area is piracy, right ? He answers to the C-level execs of the media conglomerate who owns the studio, and those guys answer to Wall Street. The head of a movie studio doesn't answer to the MPAA he rarely even interfaces with the MPAA (if at all). It doesn't set any grand, strategic agendas within the industry itself. (Extremely fat, lavishly well fed cats, who have no individual incentives to be herded.) The MPAA seems large and monolithic, but it's basically a lobbying organization. When we say 'Hollywood should just do X,' we're talking about herding cats. It's an industry full of competing companies with conflicting agendas. Secondarily, because 'Hollywood' isn't a single entity. Primarily, because nobody has any idea where it needs to be moved to. The problem for Hollywood is that 'moving the trash can' is extremely hard. But even at its peak, piracy wasn't hurting movies the way it was hurting music. To some extent, that's because the movie business has been very good at stomping out piracy (at least among mainstream, non-tech-savvy consumers). It's even more apt when you look at the numbers and see that piracy isn't hurting the top or bottom line for the movie business to any appreciable degree. To this day, Marco's analogy is one of the simplest, most creative, and best I've ever read on this topic.

Popcorn time 4.5