Canadian Telecoms Boss Publicly Shames Daughter For Netflix VPN “Piracy”

The new President of Canadian telecoms company Bell Media has branded her daughter a “thief” and reprimanded her for watching US Netflix through a VPN. Mary Ann Turcke found out that her 15-year-old daughter was accessing the US Netflix, rather than make do with the inferior Canadian service, but Turcke rebuked the girl for “stealing” and put a stop to it, an audience at the Canadian Telecom Summit heard.

Turcke recalled her daughter asking her, “Mom, did you know that you can hack into U.S. Netflix and get so many more shows?” Rather than question a system that restricts content based on exclusive deals based on geographical lines, the Bell Media boss instead chose to overreact, telling the Toronto audience, “She is 15 and she was stealing. Suffice to say, there is no more VPNing.” Sounds like a fun household.

“It has to become socially unacceptable to admit to another human being that you are VPNing into U.S. Netflix,” she continued. “Like throwing garbage out of your car window, you just don’t do it. We have to get engaged and tell people they’re stealing.”

Watching Netflix via a VPN might contravene the streaming service’s terms and conditions, but it is not illegal – certainly not “stealing, as Turcke puts it – and points to a larger problem with geo-blocking and the availability of content. The fault lies with studio policy regarding their properties, studios that have indicated that they have little interest in tackling piracy.

These people want to pay for content; “Netflix pirates” have to subscribe to the service in order to bypass region locks, and instead of being celebrated they are chastised and treated like criminals. If all these “thieves” cared about was getting content by any means, they’d be downloading torrents for free. Watching Netflix through a VPN is unethical, at worst. Not a crime. But I’m sure Turcke’s daughter really appreciated being publicly shamed by her mother for the sake of a flimsy political point.

Thank you TorrentFreak for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of Computing.co.uk.