Should a business in Ontario, such as a bar, be guilty of breach of copyright for showing U.S. Netflix on its big screen televisions to customers?

Netflix, Inc. ("Neflix"), a Delaware corporation, licenses the right to stream motion pictures and television shows to paid subscribers from motion picture and television studios in the United States of America such as Sony Pictures Television, Inc. ("Sony") and Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. ("Columbia").These studios own the legal copyright in the digital content of these pictures and shows and license them to Netflix on a regional geographic use basis.In other words, Sony for example might license a library of 50,000 pictures and shows to Netflix on condition that they only stream them to subscribers who have computers inside the geographic area of the United States of America.Then, Sony licenses a different library of perhaps 5,000 pictures and shows to Netflix on condition its content only be streamed to subscribers who have computers located inside the geographic area of Canada.Sony does this to make more money off multiple licenses in multiple countries.

In order to obtain permission to use a library of pictures or shows, Netflix signs a license contract with Sony and with the other studios agreeing to use "geolocation technology" to identify and prevent access from its subscribers who are not located within the geographic territory for which that library is licensed for streaming to Netflix.If Netflix allows someone outside the licensed geographic area to receive the content by streaming, then Netflix has breached its licensing agreement and may have breached copyright (grey area).Consequently, when customers sign up with Netflix they agree to stream only the Netflix available in their geographic area and Netflix sets up blocking technology to prevent customers from outside allowed geographic regions from access content allocated only to those regions.

Ontario customers such as a bar business may pay a VPN service (virtual private network provider) to try to circumvent the "geolocation technology" to access U.S. Netflix while subscribing to Canadian Netflix.This gives the Canadian subscriber access to the larger U.S. library of Netflix content.

Under recent changes to Canadian copyright law, it is illegal to circumvent technological protection measures designed to prevent access to copyrighted content (Thomas, 2015).This is known as breaking digital locks.

THE TASK:

QUESTIONS:

1.Has the bar business breached the licensing agreement with Netflix by using a VPN service and accessing the U.S. library of Netflix movies and TV shows?If so, why?

2.Besides breaching the license agreement with Netflix, what two things would a U.S. copyright owner such as Sony have to prove in a Canadian federal court to establish that the bar owner has breached copyright?How successful do you think they would be and why?