Sydney Morning Herald ribs Rod Drury over Netflix

The Sydney Morning Herald has labelled Rod Drury "Netflix's most prominent pirate".

The latest instalment of the Fairfax paper's "CBD" column notes (as NBR did last week) that the Xero boss has made a couple of social media comments on Netflix's crackdown against unblockers (low-cost services that let New Zealanders, and others, access the usually geo-blocked Netflix US and other offshore services that typically boast a lot more content that local streaming video-on-demand efforts).

Mr Drury has made three tweets on the issue:

• "Sceptical Netflix will really geolock hard. Too much Revenue at risk and will 10x illegal downloading. Should create global plan."
• "Nooooooo" (in reply to a tweet announcing the latest crackdown.
• A retweet of a user who posted "Netflix just blocked my VPN to watch xfiles, so simply cancelled Netflix sub, torrented the rest of the show, Hollywood geoblocking = $0." (A tweet that seemed of dubious authenticiy to NBR given the X-Files reboot streams through rival Hulu, not Netflix; Netflix does feature older series of the show).

He also re-tweeted the NBR special feature audio above, in which Consumer's resident tech expert, Hadyn Green, predicts Netflix crackdown won't last a month.

It's fair to say Rod's sentiment is widely shared. And it's a moot point whether using an unblocking service is piracy.*

And it won't do his company's brand any harm any harm that he's advocating for globalisation and taking advantage of new technology to expand paying audiences over protection of old-world regional distribution monopolies.

Nevertheless, CBD asks "Is he toeing the line and submitting himself to the inferior offerings in the land of the long white cloud?"

And it adds, cheerfully ignoring it has already called the Xero boss a pirate, "Of course, CBD does not suggest that the founder and CEO of a company so reliant on intellectual property rights is advocating piracy."

Mr Drury would not comment to the Fairfax paper but told NBR this morning, "I pay for all content consumed but share the frustration where old world business models restrict access to information and global culture to New Zealanders." (And, yes, a visitor from Mars would translate that as "I use Netflix US but I pay for it").

CBD did dig out a New York Times interview with the Xero boss from early last year, in which he says, quite sensibly, that "Tech is globalising everything, so anyone building just a regional strategy isn't thinking big enough." 

Netflix has since "gone global" in that it has dramatically expanded its footprint to 190 countries. But the SVOD provider is still offering plans on a country-by-country basis. It says it has long term ambitions to offer global plans, or something close to the same content in every country.

Meanwhile, two weeks into Netflix's self-proclaimed crackdown, there have still been only a smattering of reports of Kiwis (or others offshore) being blocked from Netflix US, and even then unblocking services are quickly finding workarounds.

In February last year, as the New York Times brought Mr Drury's use of an unblocker to Netflix' attention, Netflix corporate comms director Cliff Edwards told the paper, "There's not a lot we can do to track that since VPNs [virtual private networks, used to beat geo-blocks by masking a person's country of origin] by their very nature are set up to be difficult to spot."

Mr Edwards made a similar comment to NBR around the same time, as did Netflix chief technical officer Neil Hunt.

It remains to be seen if Netflix has made some kind of technical breakthrough since, or if it just feels under pressure to posture on the issue as it seeks to negotiate global rights.

* NBR has previously published legal opinions from Baldwins IP specialist Paul Johns, who is of the opinion our pre-internet era Copyright Act (1994) is inconclusive on the matter and needs a test case (unfortunately the Global Mode case -- mismatched from a financial resource point of view — was settled before it made it to court) and Lowndes Jordan partner Rick Shera, who is confident unblockers are legal. Mr Shera equates them to parallel importing in the physical world, which is well established as legal. Using an unblocker does break Netflix' terms & conditions, but ordering an All Blacks jersey from offshore also ran against Adidas' wishes for a period, to use a real-world parallel importing example.