Borders closed to bits: no online Tour de France in Canada

UPDATE 2012-07-07: Situation in 2012 is the same.  Live on the television on RDS and TSN2.  If instead you live in the 21st Century and want to watch on demand on your computer in Canada... unlucky.  ENDUPDATE

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." -- Clay Shirky (The Shirky Principle, cited by Kevin Kelly)

Here's a problem: distributing content.  We used to either transport content (vinyl records, video tapes, CDs, movie film canisters) or transmit content to a geographically-limited audience (over-the-air broadcast television and radio).

And embedded into the model of content distribution that developed are "broadcast rights".  The rights to display content to your particular region.  A US TV show, a stream of bits, may show up on Canadian TV but with Canadian commercials inserted - the Canadian channels insert their commercials because they have the rights to "rebroadcast" the US TV show.  US TV shows show up on Canadian cable, but some channels are simply prohibited.  The satellite dishes and digital feeds at your cable company can receive any TV signal but you are not permitted to choose from the entire global set of offerings, only the licensed channels, the permitted content for your country.  DVDs have multiple "regions", so a DVD from one region "won't play" (is enforced in software not to work) in another region.

This trend of enforcing boundaries through law when they no longer exist as technological constraints is a symptom of trying to preserve the content distribution "problem" when it has been solved.

For example in the US you can watch Jon Stewart's Daily Show on ComedyCentral.com and many websites will highlight particular segments of interest.  All of the links for which don't work in Canada.

ComedyCentral.com will point you to the licensed Canadian channel, TheComedyNetwork.ca - but it won't preserve any of the context in the link it provides, so instead of the specific US clip, you just end up with the main Daily Show landing page in Canada.  To find a clip when you have only a US link, you have to figure out exactly what show it was from, and then manually navigate to that segment on the Canadian site.  It's ridiculous.  It would be very slightly less ridiculous if they would at least take the time to map the US links to the Canadian links.

Effectively this kind of "geofence" breaks the web.  I can say "look, here's a clip that explains my point" and link to the US site... and a Canadian clicking on the link can't see the content, they have to manually try to figure out what was linked to and navigate to it (pretty unlikely except for the very determined).  A link is not a link, a page is not a page.  A link is now artificially country-specific, a legal layer imposed on top of a borderless web.

Not only does this break the web, but in some sense it breaks capitalism.  There is no free market, there is a geographically-enforced market.  You can have the dollars ready to spend, but no one to take your money.  Want to buy the Tour de France iPad app?  Sorry, not in Canada.  Want the NBC "All Access" Tour app?  Sorry, US only.  Want to watch the Versus Tour de France online coverage?  Sorry, US only.  Want to watch the Tour with various enhanced features on the TV2 Sumo website, or the France2 website, or the Eurosport website?  Sorry, those choices are not permitted.

The situation is extra confusing as the Versus online coverage worked fine in Canada last year, it's only with their partnership with NBC that it's become US-only.

Ok, fair enough, want to watch the Tour in video on demand from a licensed Canadian source?  Sorry, one does not exist.  Don't have a TV and want to see the Tour in Canada?  Sorry, no Tour for you.  The only providers in Canada are broadcast television only, TSN2 and Evasion.  Your money is no good here.  (TSN does have streaming apps but they are provider-fenced.  Through legal magic, the open Internet turns into one that is different depending on your service provider.  TSN mobiletv only "exists" if you get the Internet through Bell and Virgin, not if you're on one of Canada's other huge ISPs such as Rogers.)

All of this to say, make sure that in your organisation you're not doing this, that you're not artificially restricting processes, people and content simply because it's the way it used to work (a typical example is content provided only on a departmental intranet when it could be provided to the entire organisation or the world).

Some screenshots to conclude:

Comments

[John G]

This is only partly persuasive. Intellectual property rights have been divided by location for ages. Lots of books are available from one publisher in the US and another in the UK, for example. Films may not be released in one country when they are available in another. Patents on a product may expire in one country before they do in another.

The Canadian restrictions on broadcast rights make (or made pre-Internet) sense in the context of the obligations on Canadian broadcasters to provide some local programming. Their ability to pay for the programming depends on their ad revenue. They sell ads based on audiences for shows that they pay to have the right to transmit. This revenue is undercut if the same shows are received in Canada from foreign signals - and the transmitters of those signals did not pay for rights to distribute in Canada.

Solution: put Canadian ads on the shows received from foreign sources. That works for cable. It does not apply to over-the-air signals, of course.

Digital content is far more divisible by time, place and user than content on other media or in other forms. So content owners understandably try to maximize revenue in doing their divisions. If distributors in Canada won't pay enough, then the content will not be distributed there. (Sometimes it is alleged that Canada does not protect the IP well enough. Most such allegations are bogus.)

Ideally this kind of restriction would not be applied to information that was really valuable, as distinct from commercially saleable. So real 'science', or academic material, or public interest information, should be transmitted freely across borders. But it's up to the content owner to decide that. What does the owner want: maximum distribution or maximum revenue? Should some public authority compensate the owner (i.e. supplement the revenue) in order to increase the distribution?

I am more concerned over technological blocks to legally permitted uses of protected intellectual property within a country. But that's a different debate (in which Canada does not currently shine, I fear.)