It's tricky. Article 36 allows some restrictions to free trade:

> ... the Treaty does not affect the existence of industrial property rights granted pursuant to the legislation of the Member States. Accordingly, national legislation on the acquisition, transfer and extinction of such rights is lawful.

So IPR can be restricted nationally. However:

> The second principle is that an industrial property right is exhausted when a product has been lawfully distributed in the market of a Member State by the owner of the right or with his or her consent. Thereafter the owner of the right may not oppose the importation of the product into any Member State where it was first marketed.

To me, this is clearly the case of VPNs: you are lawfully acquiring access to the content in the country where it is sold, and then consuming it in another country.

Use a VPN service (see my comment elsewhere on this page), register for the American service, and then, on the VPN service's website, change your Netflix region to UK or another region.

Netflix support straight out told me to do this... and I wonder about it.

I'm sort of at the point where I don't see a whole lot of difference between just torrenting whatever it is I want to watch and using a VPN to circumvent copyright restrictions... except using bittorrent is cheaper and more amenable to my crappy unreliable Internet service.

The difference is that when you're using Netflix you're actually paying the people who make the stuff you watch.

Well, no. I would actually be paying Netflix and some company providing a VPN and neither of them are making the stuff I watch.

Netflix pays the content owners / studios for the content they serve, and so the screenwriters/directors/actors/producers get paid if you use Netflix.

Not really, they still filter by country IP, so even if you register with the UK version you'll only see the local library without a VPN connection.

That's what I mean. Are they allowed to do that?