Internet Live Feeds vs. Classical Intellectual Property Protection
As recently witnessed by many during World Cup, there were many individuals who attempted to watch the recent games online but depending in which country they were located, and from which website they tried to view the games, they may have found the following statement on their screen: “the requested video cannot be displayed in your region”; instead of the game itself.
Geo-Blocking
The pop up message is due to “geo-blocking”, or “geo-fencing”, in which a website ensures that only the people within a specific geographical region can view online content such as video stream, by identifying where an individual is currently located based on the individual’s Internet Protocol (IP) address.
Broadcasters, sports leagues, music distributors, and other classic intellectual property right holders typically use geo-blocking to protect the value of its content on the Internet. Even though the Internet is borderless, licensing for commercial content is still being done using an anachronistic geographic (usually territory-by-territory) basis. Re-broadcasting to other nations, even if done through the Internet, would likely violate these region-specific licensing and distribution agreements. As such, geo-blocking has become the common business solution used to prevent unauthorized access to licensed content. Rights holders have argued that without some mechanism in which to enforce their content rights, they would lose revenue (in the form of advertising), which would make it unfeasible for them to license certain content.
As such, geo-blocking is the standard mechanism used by rights holders to enforce their rights, and is standard policy occurring worldwide. For example, Canadian residents are unable to access Hulu.com, a popular
Circumventing the Geo-Block
However, geo-blocking is not all powerful. As one would expect, geo-blocking is readily open to circumvention. Individuals who wish to access content on sites blocked in the country in which they are located can evade geo-blocking by disguising their computer’s IP address by using a service that relays the individual’s Internet connection through a proxy server in another country, so that the individual appears to be located in that country. There does not appear to be solutions for such circumvention, and rights holders have resigned themselves to the fact that at this point, such techniques must be simply tolerated.
While not fool-proof, geo-blocking is nevertheless common because traditional broadcast rights are still perceived as being more valuable than such other, newer, rights that allow for online distribution. Advertising is still the greatest form of revenue generator. As such, rights holders may perceive that there is little benefit for them to stream their programs online for viewers outside of their designated territory, where the goods and services which the advertisers are promoting may not be accessible by viewers from other countries, or appeal to viewers from other countries. However, this view will likely change as a greater amount of people watch videos online, instead of watching content through the traditional broadcasting medium.
As this change occurs, licensing content by territory, and the correspondence solution of geo-blocking to enforce the license of right holders, may be inadequate. When licensors and right holders first negotiated licenses for content, it is doubtful that the parties envisioned the existence of a global community in which individuals could interact via the World Wide Web. As such, perhaps the method to license content should be rethought, so that while the rights of rights holders are protected, greater options for individuals seeking to access content online are provided at the same time. For example, perhaps Internet broadcasting rights could be sold to local companies, separate from traditional broadcasting rights.
Until the methods currently used are rethought and altered, individuals wishing to access blocked content will simply have to use proxy servers to evade geo-blocking, or wait and hope that rights issues in the territory in which the individual is located are resolved.
Heydary, Javad
(416) 972-9001 Ext. 201
clientservices@heydary.com
