In this age of the Internet the world remains divided up into copyright-protected islands, but that need not stop you from sampling what’s out there, says Stephen Dawson.

A few months ago we reviewed the excellent Oppo Blu-ray player. In addition to fine basic performance, it featured a bunch of internet features like Netflix and Cinema Now and Film Fresh, subscription services through which you can stream movies, thousands and thousands of movies, to view on your own TV.

The problem is that the world is divided up into copyright fiefdoms. The US is one. Australia is in a different one. So far the likes of Netflix, the leading US video streaming service, seemingly hasn’t been able to work out how to provide these services in Australia. Each of those thousands and thousands of movies has rights holders associated with them, and working through the relevant legal thicket is a nightmare.

But this isn’t all about Oppo. You might want to purchase a Roku media streamer, or some other brand, from the US to achieve the same end. You might want to stream video to your computer from US sites restricted to the US.

All these blocked by the service providers who routinely check the location of would-be users. If you’re not in their fiefdom you’re out of luck.

But such barriers are can’t survive the determined efforts of computer and internet users.

Relocating
The trick is to make it look to the content provider that your computer is located in the United States (or wherever else you need to be) rather than in Australia. Internet sites have ways of working out the location of the IP address from which a request has been sent. But imagine a service in the United States, though, which could accept a request from Australia, resend it to the intended site but from its own IP address, which would be correctly identified as being a US one and thus accepted. The service would accept responses and forward them back to you.

There are some free services that can do this, but reviews tend to be negative. They typically don’t have the capacity to handle the traffic, especially that which is involved in streaming video. Pay services to achieve these ends aren’t expensive.

There are two well-established ways of achieving these ends: one quick and easy way, one rather more complicated, but with more associated features.

Quick and easy is doing just as described. One such service is unblock-us.com. It just repackages your web traffic so that it looks like it’s coming from within the US, and costs $US4.99 per month (you get a free one month trial to see if you like it).

Be careful in setting up. The default setup suggestion on the site won’t give you full service. Under the step ‘Configure Your Device’ the unblock-us.com website noted that my computer was running Windows 7 and provided a link to useful setup information. But that will only allow the computer to look like it’s in the US. In many cases you will want non-computer devices, such as Blu-ray players or audio and video streamers, to have access to American-restricted resources, so you should find the section for configuring routers.

This site provides specific instructions for a wide range of routers. But you will need to know how to access your router’s administration pages. Typically you just type into a web browser your network address with a ‘1’ in the last position, as in 192.168.1.1, and then enter the user ID (‘admin’) and password (‘password’, ‘admin’ or blank). All you need to do is enter the provided IP addresses into the main and alternate/s fields for the DNS – the Domain Name Server – which is where the router finds out what IP address is associated with, say, connectedhome.com.au. As usual, we use words and computers prefer numbers, particularly Base 16 ones.

That done (and everything rebooted), the digital world will henceforth think that you’re in the United States rather than here. Beware: if any of the Australian resources you’re used to accessing also control access based on territory, then you may have to abandon them.

Your own international network
Virtual Private Networks – VPNs – kind of do the same thing, at least as seen by the outside world. But they do a lot more. A VPN allows you to conduct a fully private network all across the world using the resources of the internet. The key to this is encryption. Once you set it up everything you send over the internet from your computer is encrypted and sent to the VPN provider’s servers, where it is decrypted and sent out into the internet to do its stuff. But it is sent clean of references to you and your location, making you anonymous. When a web page responds, your provider’s servers encrypt that and send it back to you. All of this works invisibly to you. But to the outside world you appear to be at the location assigned by your VPN provider, and in theory at least your interactions can’t be traced back to you.

Of course, you have to pay for such a service. The cost is anywhere from a little more to a lot more than something like unblock-us.com. So your VPN provider will know who you are. The VPN has a physical presence somewhere in the world and as such is likely to be able to be served with search warrants and such. We mention this just to make clear that while a VPN can be useful, it provides no safe warrant to conduct illegal activities. VPNs were developed to allow businesses to have a secure wide area network using regular Internet infrastructure.

VPNs tend to be more complicated to set up and can involve installing software on your computer/s. Once again, you will want this to work at the router, though, so that all your devices can make use of it. So you will need a fairly high-end router, or one of the specially fitted routers available from some VPN providers.

What we won’t do
Most of the video streaming sources are subscription services. That means you’ve got to pay them, typically with your credit card. We are not going to give any advice at all on this subject since there’s a reasonable chance that some laws may be broken with some of the workarounds that may be required (e.g. specifying a US mailing address for your Australian card if a second level of location checking is implemented, although apparently many businesses are perfectly happy to accept Australian addresses in their payment system).

The future
As a general rule, we expect the law and content owners’ legal practices to gradually bend over time towards accepting the reality that virtual borders, at least in the West, are so porous they may as well not exist. The blocks in place clearly keep out the extremely casual user, but even a novice can follow the simple instructions for a service like unblock-us.com and have US access in minutes. Indeed, it can be easier to set that up than to sign up for the video streaming service that is the purpose of all of this.

In any case, streaming video providers are working on negotiating the regulatory thickets so they can do business here. As I write, the Netflix interface on the Oppo Blu-ray player says ‘Sorry, Netflix is not available in your country’ but adds ‘… yet’ and provides an email notification facility for ‘when Netflix is available’.

Meanwhile, though, there is something of an occasional cat and mouse game proceeding in which those seeking to restrict territorial access for various reasons (not just for media access, but sometimes for political reasons) look for unusual numbers of access requests coming from one source and then block it on the assumption that it is some kind of VPN or anonymiser access point. Unlikely, but it can’t be ruled out so you could suffer a service outage. Since you’ll be operating in a legally grey area across international jurisdictions, getting things sorted is not necessarily going to be easy, especially if you have to put your hand up and admit that you were working around a content provider’s access controls.

The information in this article is provided for general information only. No liability is assumed by the publisher for inappropriate use of this material. Please seek independent legal advice prior to setting up a VPN or using a relocation website.