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VPN providers in France ordered to block pirate sports IPTV

torrentfreak.com

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Re: VPN providers in France ordered to block pirate sports IPTV

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_(broadcasting)

If I'm understanding that right then the games are available to watch legally, it's a problem self-inflicted by the customers who choose not to get the service they're available on. Because it's not their preferred service.

Cable companies have monopolies. For a lot of people, they couldn't even choose to pay for the cable operator who owned the station. For a long time only 30% of the market could even get the channel if they wanted to. Now it's only slightly better because theoretically one can stream it on DirecTV's stupid expensive streaming service or get it on one satellite provider but not any of the others.

Re: VPN providers in France ordered to block pirate sports IPTV

#82
post #39

How about making access to the games fairly priced and easily accessible? Streaming services have dramatically reduced piracy by making it way easier and way cheaper than ever before to consume content. I don't live in Europe, but if it is like US sports, you need to jump through hoops, pay through the nose, and have 14 different accounts to watch all the sports you want.

Yes, NHL blackouts are a great example. You want to watch your home team? Great, you have to subscribe to what they refer to as your “RSN” (regional sports network, usually a regular tv channel). But the RSN doesn’t show all the games across the league, nor will it show playoff hockey. So you need to also subscribe to a big streaming service like Sportsnet. It gets worse: your RSN may not offer a streaming service. S…

I'm so glad Diamond Sports Group imploded from their excessive debt load and now Dallas Stars and Texas Rangers are available on Victory+ for free.

Re: VPN providers in France ordered to block pirate sports IPTV

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge swaths of Los Angeles are completely unable to watch Dodgers games on TV because of the way the cable companies have packaged and delivered the content. You know, one of the most valuable sports franchises in the world, makes total sense.

What do you mean, the cable companies block Dodger games from being on cable? That doesn't make sense.

it does make sense if certain companies pays certain money that prevent other companies buying the same services

aka Exclusivity right

Re: VPN providers in France ordered to block pirate sports IPTV

#84

People here are very fond of Mullhad VPN. I have mixed experiences with NordVPN, especially under Linux. If you look for something cheap, AirVPN hast a sale going on: https://airvpn.org/ It works okay for me or my current needs. https://expatcircle.com/cms/privacy/vpn-services/

Interesting isn't it, everyone heres favourite vpn doesn't make the list. The one vpn that seems to tick every box that you could want, suspiciously absent.

Re: VPN providers in France ordered to block pirate sports IPTV

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every VPS provider is "a service to circumvent the block" because you can configure one as a VPN in around 30 seconds, and these are all just legitimate foreign companies many of which use Cloudflare or other shared IP services for their own websites. Are you going to block AWS and Azure and everything on them because US-region instances don't implement French website blocks? You've gone from blocking a couple of pir…

> Are you going to block AWS and Azure and everything on them because US-region instances don't implement French website blocks *French shrug* I guess their idea is to just make it obnoxious enough for casual users. At the moment a French resident wanting to watch these games without paying can just install VPN, connect to it, and watch the pirate streams. If the VPN providers are forced to comply, having a VPS is st…

> I guess their idea is to just make it obnoxious enough for casual users.

This is always the excuse, but how does that ever work? People want to be able to do it, technical people know how to do it, non-technical people ask them to do it for them. If the number of non-technical people is large, a single one the technical people will make a one-click installer to automate it so they don't have to keep doing it manually for people, and then the inconvenience is gone for everyone.

The companies peddling this stuff are desperate to rationalize that it can do any good. A million games will have DRM and their customers will hate it and they'll collectively lose billions of dollars by inconveniencing legitimate customers or have people pirating their stuff out of spite when they would have actually bought it. Then some game doesn't get cracked for a while because it's a statistical anomaly or it's just not very popular and nobody bothers and they get to congratulating themselves without ever considering how many of the people who didn't pirate that game actually bought it instead of just pirating a different one, or if the number of people who bought it is smaller than the number of sales they lost through destruction of goodwill -- for not only that game but also all the games that were cracked right away.

And then they double down with this kind of website blocking overreach where they're unapologetically causing collateral damage to innocent people as if to demonstrate just how little they care about anything but the dubious pretense that it was worth it.

Re: VPN providers in France ordered to block pirate sports IPTV

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhones have always been able to access web pages. Web pages run on general purpose computers, and basically have to, because they're made of site-specific content and site-specific code. To get rid of "piracy" you would not only need to prevent users from having access to their own phones , you would need to make it impossible for anybody to have their own web page. That level of dystopia is the sort of thing that c…

when you try to connect to some commercial streaming websites in France, you already have to upload your ID, film yourself with your camera, and enable biometrics, as the government forced them to do that "to protect children" (even as they're in the middle of a scandal about silencing children when things went south in some institutions up to 20 years ago). last time I checked, China didn't force users to give in th…

> dystopia is never far away in France, and ppl always agree

Isn't the entire premise here that people are instead using pirate services that presumably don't require you to upload your ID and film yourself with a camera?

Re: VPN providers in France ordered to block pirate sports IPTV

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_(broadcasting)

If I'm understanding that right then the games are available to watch legally, it's a problem self-inflicted by the customers who choose not to get the service they're available on. Because it's not their preferred service.

Spoken truly like someone who's never wanted to follow their favorite sports team in their life.

Re: VPN providers in France ordered to block pirate sports IPTV

#88

People here are very fond of Mullhad VPN. I have mixed experiences with NordVPN, especially under Linux. If you look for something cheap, AirVPN hast a sale going on: https://airvpn.org/ It works okay for me or my current needs. https://expatcircle.com/cms/privacy/vpn-services/

I've been an AirVPN customer for years and really no complaints. They aren't the most flashy or advertised but have never failed me!

Re: VPN providers in France ordered to block pirate sports IPTV

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_(broadcasting)

If I'm understanding that right then the games are available to watch legally, it's a problem self-inflicted by the customers who choose not to get the service they're available on. Because it's not their preferred service.

> Because it's not their preferred service.

Right. What's your point? Virtually all media is available for free via consequence-free piracy, but generally at the cost of quality and convenience. I don't see that ever changing. Legitimate venders can provide a better quality product. That's how you sell, you become the preferred service by offering a better version at a price the customer is both willing and able to pay.

Customers don't have a problem, they can always get a form of the media they want if they are willing to pay in price or convenience.

Re: VPN providers in France ordered to block pirate sports IPTV

#90
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright law has always been the most powerful force on the Internet. Which is why its collision with AI companies who pirate the whole Internet is very interesting.

If AI training is piracy then all art made by humans is also piracy... we cannot create anything without drawing inspiration from something else. The question is exactly how much is copied, and how obvious it is.

The law can be different between humans and machines!

Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't make sense, but either way the law can do it. The law doesn't have to follow first principles.

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