UK IP Office Tries To Claim Netflix Password Sharing Is Illegal
from the password-sharing-is-the-devil dept
The UK Government’s Intellectual Property Office published new piracy guidance this week claiming that Netflix password sharing is illegal.
Back when Netflix was a pesky upstart trying to claw subscribers away from entrenched cable providers, the company had a pretty lax approach to users who shared streaming passwords. At one point CEO Reed Hastings went so far as to say he “loved” password sharing, seeing it as akin to free advertising. The idea was that as kids or friends got on more stable footing (left home to job hunt, whatever), they’d inevitably get hooked on the service and purchase their own subscription.
But as Netflix subscription numbers have begun to go south and competitors are challenging Netflix’s market share and revenue, the company is predictably taking a harder stance on the practice. That has involved nickel-and-diming paying subscribers to pay more money, but it also apparently involves urging governments to conflate password sharing with piracy.
On cue, the UK’s new piracy guidance does exactly that:
“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. Where these provisions are provided in civil law, it would be up to the service provider to take action through the courts if required.”
Shortly after the UK government issued the guidance it backtracked without explanation. I’d assume that’s only temporary, as this campaign to demonize password sharing is ramping up across most of Netflix’s territories. When contacted by the BBC, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) didn’t rule out prosecuting folks for password sharing, though a police investigation would be needed first:
“Any decision to charge someone for sharing passwords for streaming services would be looked at on a case-by-case basis, with due consideration of the individual context and facts of each case. As with all cases, if they are referred to the CPS by an investigator for a charging decision, our duty is to bring prosecutions where there is sufficient evidence to do so and when a prosecution is required in the public interest.”
This is, as is most of the hand-wringing about password sharing, dumb. Here’s the thing: corporations like Netflix and HBO spent the better part of a decade normalizing and encouraging password sharing. They adored it.
Now that they’re facing greater competition and tighter margins, they want to pivot on a dime and blame password sharing for most of their problems. And they want the government to help them. Apparently by pretending that loaning your credentials to a friend or your college kid is downright villainous, and by comically overstating the financial impact password sharing is having on their bottom lines.
Netflix already imposes routine price hikes. And it already technically monetizes password sharing by limiting the number of simultaneous streams per account, charging you more money if you want more simultaneous streams. As such the password sharing crackdown is a nickel-and-diming effort from a company that’s trying to make up for subscriber losses by soaking the customers that remain.
If you’re noticing a lot of egomania, fuzzy numbers, and wishful thinking on Netflix’s part, that’s because as Netflix grew and shifted from innovation to turf protection, it joined the Motion Picture Association and adopted much of the broader cable, broadcast, and entertainment industry’s (sometimes facts-optional) rhetoric surrounding the diabolical menace that is password sharing.
I’d imagine there will be plenty more facts-optional hyperventilation on this subject in the new year, both in the US and UK, as streaming giants get government officials all hot and bothered.
Filed Under: cable tv, copyright, password sharing, piracy, streaming, uk, uk ipo, video
Companies: netflix
Comments on “UK IP Office Tries To Claim Netflix Password Sharing Is Illegal”
How surprising, they don’t have any ethics or guts at all.
Ergo
Netflix Logic
1) Love is sharing a password;
2) Sharing a password is piracy;
3) Ergo, love is piracy.
But this conflicts (conflix?) with many other well-known, time-tested philosophies, such as:
– Love is all you need. – Paul McCartney
– Love is a better teacher than duty. – Albert Einstein
– Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. – Robert Frost (which, we might add, comports nicely with #1 above)
Re: Ogre
“Imagine no possessions” – John Lennon
Huh. That’s a funny way of saying “when our corporate masters insist upon it.”
Re:
It’s also a diplomatic way of saying that, as CPS does not have infinite resources and UK courts are increasingly backlogged, it’s going on the list somewhere behind those icecream vans with Disney characters painted on the sides with house paint.
Which isn’t the same thing as having a sane legal system, but oh well.
This Netflix password sharing issue reminds me of some stupid propaganda I saw: “You can not true enjoy a game you didn’t pay for”. Which I guess was supposed to be anti-copyright infringement, but in their breathless rush to defend (what is probably copyright over-reach), they have decided to rule out gifting.
Here Netflix appears to be saying “Sure, you can have multiple content streams at the same time, on the same account”, and also “but if anyone other than you has a stream, you are infringing on copyright!”
I guess the thought is that peoples brains have to be licensed to see the content?
Both situations seem… very self destructive in the long run.
Re:
There is a story repeated across cultures called “The Smell of Food and the Sound of Money”. An innkeeper or restauranteur accuses a passer-by, student or beggar of unjustly enriching himself without payment by taking in the fragrant aroma of the food, thus the innkeeper is owed money for the food because the smell is a part of the food. The passer-by, or a judge, decides to jingle some coins in the innkeeper’s ear. Confused, the innkeeper asks for an explanation, and is told “the sound of the money is part of the money”.
Re:
““You can not true enjoy a game you didn’t pay for”. Which I guess was supposed to be anti-copyright infringement, but in their breathless rush to defend (what is probably copyright over-reach), they have decided to rule out gifting.”
The fundamental issue a lot of these people have is that they don’t understand how media has always been consumed, be that videogames, movies, music, books or whatever. Most people just don’t pay directly for what they consume. It used to be that companies used this to their advantage, understanding that more people listened to a song on the radio than would ever buy a copy, that books would be sold used or read via a library, people would lend copies of whatever when they finished or even copy tracks to a mixtape.
Now, they’re obsessed with both tracking and monetising every time someone consumes those things. Even Netflix themselves – while they were growing the company they explicitly said they didn’t mind account sharing. Now, they seem to be getting pressure from the same investor class to crack down, even though it’s counter-productive. Will this stuff result in more Netflix subscribers, or more piracy of Netflix content, or more people switching to legal free options? I suspect the latter.
Sadly, I think this is what you get when you let the MBAs run the show instead of people who actually grew up loving the content. If you only view a shared experience as lost revenue instead of remembering how you developed a love for the medium through the things that were shared with you, then you might not understand why “free” can mean more money.
They also overvalue whatever they’re trying to sell right now, forgetting that “OK, I’ll do something else” or “you know, I do have a bunch of DVD I never got round to watching” are equally valid responses.
Pirates
Pirates habit the seas and TAKE STUFF FROM its owners and its owners no longer have them. That’s not what happens here.
What happens here is SHARING.
Netflix password sharing is no different than sharing my guest room, car, or food. I have an AWS cloud with several VPSs spun up. Those are available to any of my friends that want access to a VPS. Am I not allowed to share? Fuck them.
I have a house. There is a guest room. If a family member or friend needs a place to stay, it’s right here.
FUCK Netflix, and FUCK the slow small useless side of The Pond, and may they pass all the laws they want.
They can come file suit against me. In US courts they’ll have to show damages to collect. I’ll have to show that they had no right to sue me.
Best of luck Netflix, and fuck you and your UK lapdogs.
Re: re: FUCK the slow small useless side of The Pond
Which makes you what exactly? The slow large useless site of the Pond?
Which side is it where the pigs shoot you dead in your bed and get away with it? Which is the side that claimed copyright infringement meant “a tune with a similar feel?”
If your government goes a couple of days without saying stupid shit get back to me.
Re:
“I have a house. There is a guest room. If a family member or friend needs a place to stay, it’s right here.”
Erm, I get the sentiment, but that’s because you own the property. It would be a little different if you rented a 2 bed hotel room then invited 10 of your friends to stay the night.
To my mind, if Netflix themselves want to enforce this, they have to change terms of service and start causing problems for a lot of legal consumers. If I’m at work in my company’s head office, my girlfriend wanted to watch something as home and our flatmate wants to watch something on the road, all 3 in different countries (to give one recent hypothetical that’s similar to my own situation), I don’t want to be told I’m “stealing”, we’re abiding by what we paid for. I can understand if they don’t want “4 devices” to mean “15 people can watch so long as they’re not doing it at the same time”, but that’s what their rules currently allow.
“FUCK the slow small useless side of The Pond”
While the Tories are indeed a backward bunch, I don’t think that xenophobia will help your position here. I’d at least advise you to try separating the government from the people in your mind, especially after some recent events in the US.
An account is paid for in terms of n concurrent streams. How does it matter if any of the streams, concurrent or not, are consumed by entities outside of one particular brick-and-mortar residence?
Re:
This is all that matters. If Netflix allow streams from multiple devices, multiple locations, etc. and the only restriction is the number of simultaneous streams, then it should be irrelevant whether I use all of them myself, or let someone else use what I paid for.
It’s the same “one download = one lost sale” nonsense all over again. There will be people who abuse the system, as there is with any system, but anyone who thinks that all the people sharing Netflix with a friend so they can watch a movie a month will turn into fully paid monthly subscribers are deluded. Depending on how it’s enforced, blocking sharing will be unlikely to lead to a significant rise in paying customers, and might even cause them to lose a significant number.
“where the intent is to allow a user to access copyright-protected works without payment”
Well since those sharing the password with others have already paid for it, whats the fscking problem other than some idiots trying to decide suddenly that just because we sold you 4 concurrent streams we meant 4 concurrent streams to ONLY 1 house.
'How dare you show someone how lousy our service is?!'
Netflix is just going above and beyond in devaluing their service and driving people out the door and into the arms of it’s competitors…
I wonder if in the US the CFAA could be abused due to “password trafficking” or if streaming services could claim Unauthorized Computer Access with Intent to Defraud.
“allow a user to access copyright-protected works without payment”
Which isn’t happening. People are paying, they just happen to share with people who didn’t. So, it’s no different than me renting a movie from Blockbuster, lending it to a friend who wanted to see the same movies, then returning it in the agreed period. Which, last I checked, happened a lot in the 90s with no complaints.
The aim appears to be to force each individual to pay directly for all the entertainment they consume, which I can say with complete confidence has not only never been the case in the entirety of recorded media, but which cannot be enforced without significant financial losses.
You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain. Netflix hasn’t died a hero.