[Barrin92]

>. It amazes me how few services ever take into consideration that people don't always live and work in their country of origin

I'm pretty sure they would take it into consideration, it's just that licensing of IP is a really tricky business. It's not a technical or business issue, it's a legal issue because bypassing geo-restrictions with a VPN is probably violating the terms of service of most content producers.

In the entire UAE IIRC only licensed telecommunications providers can produce telecom. services, and that's why Whatsapp can't offer call

[TheOtherHobbes]

It's only a legal issue because it's allowed to be.

The concept of "licensing territory" for IP is a 19th century relic. Licensing rights for streamed content could easily be made personal instead of national.

Given the amount of expense and effort required to police specific IPs, it would be likely cheaper to handle this with a fine-grained approach than to keep refining the current mess with ever-more-complex content limiting epicycles.

[unionpivo]

> It's only a legal issue because it's allowed to be.

That describes all legal issues.

I agree with you that its a relic that we should get rid of.

But its not simple to get rid of. There are tons of existing contracts.

There are some companies that their whole business is being content "distributer" for countries/territories. They will do anything they can to make sure they stay in business. They might be equivalent of horse whip manufacturer, but that doesn't mean they will go down without a fight.

For giant content owners like Disney, its probably easier to "contract renegotiation". Netfilx even if they were prepared to pay for worldwide distribution deal, it doesn't mean that content owners are willing or able to sell (if they have other exclusive agreements).

This mess would take a while (and by that I mean years and possibly decades) even if there was somebody powerful pushing for it. And I am not sure if there is any such powerful entity pushing for it.

Another way would be to have some kind of international deal-agreement but that's even harder to get.

In short technical side is the easiest. And all IP/VPN blocking is peanuts compared to what it would cost(time and money) to renegotiate all the deals.

[bpodgursky]

Yeah like, if the licensing wasn't an issue, Netflix would have a menu somewhere where you could simply select a country. They aren't doing this to be malicious, they just can't legally show certain content in certain countries.