Dissidents and journalists have relied on VPNs for unrestricted web access in authoritarian states for years. Thanks to murky Internet law, it turns out they may have another perfectly legal use as well.
The British documentary 56 Up, is airing exclusively on U.K. television right now. Part of the acclaimed and popular decades-long Up series, which has revisited the same 14 people every seven years, it’s an important and unique documentary. But there’s no date set for when or if it will air on TV in the U.S.
ITV, the U.K. television network and the studio behind 56 Up, is streaming the film on their website. But the moment the page loaded my excitement was crushed when I was met with a pop-up that read: “Sorry. This video is only available to be viewed within the United Kingdom.” So it’s not available online on this side of the Atlantic, either.
Seemingly, the only way to watch it is illegally. Which is ridiculous, as I’ve argued before.
Then I received an email that changed everything. A reader of my piece for The Atlantic, and a diehard fan of the series, told me that there is a way: a VPN (virtual private network), which essentially disguises where your IP address is located, so you could be in one country but it appears that you are located somewhere else — like the U.K. (VPNs typically have received press for their use by dissidents and journalists in authoritarian states like China so they can have unrestricted use of the web.) There are multiple types of VPNs and the details about how they work get pretty technical. But in a nutshell, as Pete Davis, a VPN expert from tech giant Cisco explained to me, “normally the end user’s IP address is located in whatever immediate area he is in, but with a VPN you use a piece of software on your computer to establish a connection with a server at some other location.”
But before I pulled the trigger on using a VPN to watch the series from across the ocean, I had to know: Is it legal? After contacting numerous attorneys who specialize in Internet and intellectual property law, the short(ish) answer is “basically yes, but it’s complicated.”
