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A comment on Canada's Bell Tried to Have VPNs Banned During NAFTA Negotiations. Parent comment

Re:Canada's Bell Tried to Have VPNs Banned During NAFTA Nego... by thaumasiotes on Friday February 01, 2019 @06:33PM (#19059821)
>> Bell argued that Canadians accessing content from a US service with a VPN “unjustly enriches the US service, which has not paid for the Canadian rights”

I see something else weird. Why would a Canadian politician care about this? You don't buy Canadian distribution rights from Canada or from any Canadian entity. You buy them from the copyright holder.

If I'm an American tourist in Canada and I want to watch Moana on my Netflix account, and I do that by tunneling back to my home computer and appearing to be located in the US, then Netflix is inappropriately delivering me content that they gave Disney money for the right to distribute within the US. But if they also needed to buy the right to distribute it in Canada... they'd give that money to Disney too. Why does Canada need Netflix to give more money to an American company?

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Re:Canada's Bell Tried to Have VPNs Banned During NAFTA Nego... by ninth_ant on Friday February 01, 2019 @06:46PM (#19059889)
> Why would a Canadian politician care about this? You don't buy Canadian distribution rights from Canada or from any Canadian entity. You buy them from the copyright holder.

Because the Canadian company paid for exclusive access to that content within Canada for the purpose of making profit. This generates tax revenue and employment and increases the value fo the company for the shareholders, things politicians care about to various degrees.

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Re:Canada's Bell Tried to Have VPNs Banned During NAFTA Nego... by sjwright on Friday February 01, 2019 @07:31PM (#19060125)
1. Company buys something that doesn’t exist.

2. Company lobbies government to demand that their something must be made to exist.

Genius.

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Re:Canada's Bell Tried to Have VPNs Banned During NAFTA Nego... by wonthegame on Friday February 01, 2019 @09:59PM (#19060735)
Many times the content is never made available to Canadians! It’s quite frustrating because we want to their content but there is no legal way.
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Re:Canada's Bell Tried to Have VPNs Banned During NAFTA Nego... by deogeo on Saturday February 02, 2019 @09:54AM (#19063248)
There's an upside to that, as buying that content would finance more of this kind of anti-consumer lobbying.
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