Without a doubt, many Canadian readers have been frustrated to find that a particular television show is available on the American iTunes, but not the Canadian one, and surely other readers have tried to watch a show at Hulu.com only to find that Canadians are barred from these videos altogether.
This situation has nothing to do with Canadian broadcasting laws, and everything to do with big-money exclusive distribution agreements between Canadian broadcasters and the Hollywood corporations that produce television content. So much for the economic efficiencies of a global marketplace when these oligopolies see fit to set prices in Canada half again as high as in the United States, even when the leveling power of the internet makes the costs of distribution the same in each country.
Fortunately, you can legally circumvent "locational discrimination" by proxying through an American server. This won't work for the American iTunes, which verifies your location based on your credit card, but will work for free sites such as Hulu.com. With a little bit of side-stepping the regular Amazon.com payment services by purchasing gift certificates with a Canadian credit card and using them with an American account, proxying will also work for Amazon.com Video On Demand.
Proxying so as to pretend your an American is perfectly legal. The only slightly grey area of this process is that, depending on the webite you visit, you may end up breaching the website Terms of Use. For example, Hulu.com states that "[u]sing technologies to access the Content from territories where Hulu does not have rights or does not offer services is prohibited."
However, breach of a contractual term is not to be confused with breaking the law. Modern contract law is prevalently informed by the theory of efficient breach, which allows any contract to be broken so as to maximize overall economic efficiency. Jargon aside, this means that you have the right to break a contract. The consequence, under the common law, is simply that you are then bound by a secondary obligation to pay for any damages that you cause.
What's the damage caused by downloading a television show from the United States? I can't think of any obvious damage. If anything, the site your visiting achieves positive gains by you paying for a video, or by you watching their advertisements -- rather than you illegally downloading the video from Bit Torrent. Granted, if large numbers of Canadians downloaded television content from the U.S., this could diminish the prospects of future exclusive deals between Canadian broadcasters and Hollywood. However, these parties are not privy to your contract with the website that you visit. Arguably, there is a remote possibility that this could be considered a "tortious interference of contract", but this tort usually has a very high bar for establishing wrongdoing.
As with any legal technicality, there are also moral considerations. It's up to you decide whether it is morally wrong to break a contractual promise--one which you probably didn't even know that you made--to a corporation that is trying to a draw a bright line across national boundaries that the internet is supposed to transcend.
You should be in the clear, legally speaking. Now for the technology side of the equation. Most of these sites use Flash to detect your real IP address, and thus your location. Flash by-passes your browser's proxy settings. Directly entering a proxy in your browser settings, or using a tool such as FoxyProxy, won't do the trick.
First, you need to download a tool that directs all of your internet traffic through a proxy (and not only your web browser traffic). For Windows, your best bet is AllProxy Lite (30 day free trial, $10 after) or Proxifier ($30 day free trial, $40 after). I'll assume the use of AllProxy for the remainder of these instructions and explanations, but the setup is similar for Proxifier.
The second item you need is a SOCKS 5 proxy server in the United States. If you happen to have a web server in the U.S., then you're set. You can use Putty to setup a SOCKS 5 server that works through your SSH connection. However, likely you don't! You'll have to use a third-party proxy service.
Although there are many free SOCKS 5 proxy servers, most will be too slow to support streaming video. However, there are many pay services that offer reasonable bandwidth for around $7-10 per month. Ensure that any service you choose supports SOCKS, and not just HTTP proxy. Two such services that I'm aware of are Proxybonanza and Proxylicious).
Once you've signed up for a proxy service and downloaded your proxy application, here's how to configure it:
- Open AllProxy Lite (or another proxy application).
- Open the Proxy Options from Proxies List -> Add Proxy. Enter the IP Address, port and login (if any) of your proxy service. Select "SOCK 5".
- In the main AllProxy Lite window, click Change and select the proxy you just added from the dropdown.
- That's it! You are now an American as far as any website is concerned.
Hopefully American content creators will soon realize that they're losing valuable marketing prospects for internet sales when they sign extensive exclusive distribution contracts in Canada. Until then...enjoy the show.
