TV Garden

One of those things that's so cool it's hard to believe it's legal

There are many broadcasting laws worldwide, many quite archaic. Even Radio Garden got meaningfully restricted in the UK (only licensed national radio stations are allowed by a high court ruling). I worry for projects like TV Garden but they are undoubtedly very cool.

Why not? Public broadcast TV stations want to be viewed, just like web radio streams!

That said, the first one I tried (a German public broadcaster) was showing a static image of “this programme is currently unavailable for legal reasons”. (I believe they do IP-based geofencing for legal/broadcasting rights reasons.)

Wait, what? Receiving foreign web radio streams in the UK is prohibited?!

How is that even enforced?

A UK High Court ruled in 2019 that websites like TuneIn are distributing illegal music[0]. It went to appeals but the previous ruling was upheld. There hasn't been much clarification beyond that nor very clear enforcement. But the precedent this ruling set makes companies fear repercussions if they accidentally link to a stream that has content not licensed for the UK. To interpret this ruling broadly would be to break the internet[1]:

> The claimants say that a finding for the defendant will fatally undermine copyright. The defendant says that a finding for the claimants will break the internet.

As usual, this happened due to rather rabid approach to copyright by big American labels. They may be legally in the right, though their actions, as always, have meaningful negative externalities. How far they reach in this case is unclear, but TuneIn and Radio Garden both have blocked non-UK streams for UK listeners.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TuneIn#Legal_issues

[1] https://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/2019/11/did-uk-judge-ju...

Wow, truly bizarre.

And TuneIn and Radio Garden don't even host any streams, to my knowledge; they're mere directories!

It is rather awkward that the US right-holders chose to sue TuneIn in the UK, rather than US radio broadcasters that stream online without appropriate licenses. However, TuneIn was profiting from the premium subscriptions relating to content they knew didn't pass muster legally, and their service foundational was based on such content. There are certainly many things to be said about it. But unfortunately the debate is already settled by the appeals court in the UK.

Overall, the UK TuneIn service was valuable to the public. And it is an example of such value being destroyed by copyright laws. This is yet another topic that many people have said much on.

> Overall, the UK TuneIn service was valuable to the public.

I agree about stream directory services in general, but I'm a bit on the fence about TuneIn in particular.

It started out very useful, especially as the de facto backbone for Google Home devices – I believe they back or at least used to back "Hey Google, play <station name>".

But lately they started playing "pre-roll ads", and I think lately even playing ads over the live content, and I'm not entirely sure if they even share the revenue of those, or of premium subscriptions that avoid ads, with the underlying radio stations.

Yeah, just because a channel is public broadcast doesn't mean some of the content it shows hasn't been commercially produced, and a license purchased for that country's geographical area only.

NFL season will likely stamp out the CBS and FOX streams in the US.

I've tried watching some Italian TV channels, and some content was not available for streaming. It's a common practice here. It also applies to satellite-transmitted channels, they usually don't have the license to show some movies on that version (you can only see them on the terrestrial signal).

You can watch NHK World from anywhere, they make it available on their website: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/live/

They show the news at the top of every hour so we check in pretty regularly.

There was a high profile court case in about 2018 where a start-up was trying to sell rebroadcasted public TV and it was ruled illegal and held up on appeal. They even tried "renting" miniature TV antennae to users with the legal theory that they never made a "copy". Sad to see it was shot down.

This is very different though: The streams are provided by the broadcasters themselves, not by somebody that receives their signal and then rebroadcasts it.

If they didn't want their content watched abroad, they would add geoblocking or authentication. Some of the ones listed on TFA actually do that for parts of their program.

They did not.