If I pay for streaming service Z but don't like their streaming tech or the geofraphical restrictions they put on show Y that I was watching while traveling, I feel that there's no ethical harm happening if I obtain a copy of Y for private storage. It might not be legal or might be in violation of ToS, but personally I wouldn't call this theft. Would you agree?
As long as you delete that copy once your streaming subscription ends, it might actually be reasonable. Otherwise a month of Netflix or Spotify would entitle you to pirate their whole catalogue.
According to whom? If region enforcement is in place, it's because of legal obligations. So yes, there's ethical harm involved when you do something like this because you're intentionally circumventing a business's legal obligations to their partners.
One thing in ethics you might ask is “if everybody did it, what would happen”?
If everybody pirated their videos, maybe media companies would get a clue and make a better product. Nobody pirates music anymore—it is much easier to just pay a small amount to Spotify and the like and get access to almost any song you’d want on basically all your devices.
If anything, perhaps it is more ethical to hard pirate video than it is to let media companies shoot them selves in the foot...
People wouldn't stop producing content because regional restrictions became something that customers don't want to pay for anymore. Any entity that refuses to change those restrictions would leave the market open for another entity who's willing to do business without imposing these terms.
The demand for the fundamental content would remain and if some suppliers are unwilling to provide for the demand, other suppliers would arise.
Did people stop producing music when Spotify hit the market? No, so why would Hollywood stop producing movies?
Music piracy was a huge problem in the 90s, and from what I can tell, that's essentially disappeared with iTunes and Spotify. It should be easy to buy exactly what you want for a reasonable price.
From what I can tell, movie and TV show piracy went way down in areas where Netflix was available, so what does Hollywood do? They lock down their content even more and reduce the content available at any given service.
That's backwards. They have a winning service, they should double down on it and make more content available. Maybe distribute new releases to Netflix customers that have a premium account or something, and have a payment tier with nearly complete access to old content with a single subscription. That's essentially what Spotify does, and it works.
That's a bridge too far. If I have Netflix and I'm in the US and then I travel overseas on vacation and I can't watch the same content, I would have no problem pirating it.
Absolutely. It's illegal, but ethical, provided you remove the content when it disappears from US Netflix and you don't share it with anyone who isn't a US Netflix customer. Also, make sure it's the same quality or worse than your service agreement is.
Ethics and contract law are different things though. Is regional licensing ethical?I don't have opinion one way or the other but violation of a contract is not automatically unethical.
I do but in modern society as a party to an exchange with a faceless entity, I have very little opportunity to change terms in a way that I feel is more fair to my circumstances. If I believe in good faith that my detraction from the terms is not unfair, detrimental or damaging to the counterparties, considering the imbalance in power at play, then I feel that I'm well within the bounds of ethical behaviour.
