An Australian government commission has released a report in which it states that Australian consumers should be legally allowed to circumvent geo-blocking restrictions. Australians get offered a lower level of digital services, according to the 'Productivity Commission'. Therefore Australians should be able to use a VPN service without the fear of infringing on copyright.
The Commission also stated that, "making copyright material more accessible and more competitively priced online, and not geoblocking, is the best antidote to copyright infringement."
Circumventing geo-blocks means that content not available in a country is accessed using a service that is able to provide the user with a fake location. This is possible with a Virtual Private Network (VPN) which allows e.g. an Australian user to route internet traffic through a server based in the United States. Because the US based VPN server connects to e.g. a movie streaming service, content normally only available to US citizens becomes available for the Australian VPN user too.
This method is often used to get access to Netflix content only available in the United States. The Productivity Commission wants the Australian government to send a clear message that, "it is not an infringement of copyright for consumers to evade geo-blocking technology."
The Commission is convinced that many people don't want to pirate content, and are even happy to pay for copyrighted content. But only if they don't want to wait till the content is finally available in their country and they want it for a fair price.
The report also mentions that current copyright protection lasts too long and used the example of an author writing a book today who lives for another 50 years being protected until 2136. "Continuing to reward someone after they're resting in peace doesn't make a lot of sense," a commissioner with the Productivity Commission told ABC Australia.
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