I have no idea if this is the case, but perhaps there are legal professionals in Gweek’s audience that might be able to enlighten us.

The analogy I gave in my other comment about maps above is for a Minkowski spacetime, where movement along the temporal dimension and movement along the spatial dimensions are mutually exclusive. In Euclidean space, the movement is not really restricted as such. This is all effectively encoded by the metric’s signature — (+, +, +, +) for Euclidean versus (-, +, +, +) for Minkowskian. I’m sure you’ve also heard of / would be interested in Wick rotation, which muddies the waters in quite interesting ways.

Be sure to double-check everything I say here, before you accept it as fact. I am a bit of a left-wing deluded nutjob that hates science.

My mother is a UK citizen and prior to the advent of the internet would have her brother physically mail PAL VHS cassettes of interesting shows to her. She, in turn, would go to an Indian grocery and paid 5-10 dollars to have each cassette converted to NTSC. Thoughout this transaction, the BBC, Channel 4, etc made F.A. off of their product. If they had offered the shows at a fair price she’d gladly had paid for them.

Streaming offers an almost instantaneous turnaround if the content provider is willing to make their content available. Any loss in current or future revenue due to piracy or (as I mentioned before) “diminished hype” IS the fault of the content provider.

If your company chooses to make a product unavailable in a market, local competition in the market is likely to produce a knockoff in its absense unless you can make the proper arangements for distribution. In the case of internet streaming, the logistical problems of shipping and negociating merchandising agreements are pracitically eliminated. There is NO REASON to delay international distribution to English-speaking countries.

The arguement of “people shouldn’t take what isn’t offered to them” is acceptable to an extent, but as a person who waited 4 years for a Japanese distributor to NOT pick up the rights to distribute “The King of Kong” and still has not licensed the 1983 movie, “A Christmas Story,” if you are not offering me a product and I take it anyway to no detriment to your physical inventory, who suffers?

So actually I don’t care that it’s illegal; but there’s a good reason for the license system and if your allowed to choose to pay for it then it becomes no different to an ad based channel.

So ye, take all the channel 4 content you like, but kindly stay off of the BBCs lawn, or send the license payer a subsidy, not the BBC.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1880141100.png

I don’t know how anyone can stream anything with a connection speed of 0.83Mb/s.

Is using a proxy to watch the iPlayer content illegal? Maybe. The BBC should sell their content overseas and pass the savings on to the UK through less expensive license fees.

If the BBC World Service were providing year old news through international affiliates they would be considered complete fools, but if they expect the modern “gotta see it before the fanboys” consumer to wait a year or several to watch a new show… they may resort to privacy or simply avoid the show altogether.

Imagine looking at a 2D overhead map of a 3D terrain, and watching some object cross the map at a constant speed. As the object starts to climb a mountain, it **appears** to slow down as it starts to move upward instead of across the map, although the object still has its constant speed. If the mountainside is practically vertical, the object will **appear** to be not moving at all, although we know it is moving up the mountain at its constant speed. This is just common sense.

Imagine looking at a 3D overhead map of a 4D terrain… and you may have an analogy for 4D spacetime. Movement in space and time are mutually exclusive, somewhat like in our the previous example where movement across the map and up the mountain are mutually exclusive. Well, sort of, but the awesome thing about analogies is that they are never exact.