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Is It Illegal to Share Your Netflix Password?
Streaming services like those offered by Disney and Hulu need to balance a desire to grow subscribers with a reluctance to anger customers
Raise your hand if you share your Netflix password. Now, quick — put your hand down before Disney sees you. When the company launches its Disney+ service later this year, it will begin what it calls “piracy mitigation” on day one, in part by preventing users from sharing passwords. Which raises the question: Is it really piracy to share your streaming login info with someone else?
If you were hoping to share your subscription with your nephew, you might run the risk of earning the Mouse’s ire.
In a joint press release between Disney and Charter Communications, the monolithic media giant stated that it would “implement business rules and techniques to address such issues as unauthorized access and password sharing.” In other words, if you were hoping to share your subscription with your nephew, you might run the risk of earning the Mouse’s ire.
What form that ire could take is anyone’s guess right now. In fact, it’s unclear how Disney might track who’s sharing passwords in the first place. At CES this year, a third-party company called Synamedia demoed a platform that could track things like where a user is watching, simultaneous streams, and viewing patterns, all in an effort to suss out likely password sharers. The goal would be to tell, with a high degree of confidence, the difference between someone sharing with a friend in another state — thus presumably denying a streaming service another subscriber — and a legitimate user who’s just traveling. Which is harder than it sounds.
But let’s say password sharers can be identified — what action could Disney take? The company didn’t respond to a request for comment, but the smart money is on either a very light punitive measure or, more likely, an upsell: “Hey, it looks like you’re sharing an account. Wouldn’t you like one of your own?” Even Synamedia told The Verge earlier this year that carrots work better than sticks.
When it comes to intellectual…
