Sydney Butler’s 12 October 2026 piece on How-To Geek, Is using a VPN to watch blocked shows piracy?, starts from a question people already treat as settled. A tunnel can make a streaming app see an address in another country. The catalogues differ because the licences differ. The interesting part is the gap between those two facts: a changed address is not a changed right, and a broken house rule is not automatically a copyright offence.
This is a reading of that argument, and of the sources it leans on. It is not legal advice. Copyright, contract, and anti-circumvention rules are territorial, and a short essay cannot tell you what applies where you live.
The tool and the use are different questions
Butler’s first move is the one that usually gets skipped. A VPN is a way of encrypting traffic and sending it out through another network. BitTorrent is a way of moving files between peers. Neither description is a licence to copy a film, and neither description is a crime by itself. In the United Kingdom and in most of the countries where a consumer VPN is sold as an ordinary product, running a tunnel is lawful. A smaller set of countries restrict or ban the technology. That is a rule about the tool, and it is separate from any rule about a particular show.
The second question is what you do with the tunnel. Uploading or downloading a film you have no right to copy is a copyright problem whether or not the packets are encrypted. Paying for a subscription and then presenting an address in a country where that title is not in your plan is a different problem. People collapse the two because both end with the same picture on the screen. The law has not collapsed them, and the commercial incentives have not either.
Why the catalogue stops at a border
A streaming service does not own a worldwide right to everything on its homepage. It buys, territory by territory, the right to offer a title for a period, on a set of devices, sometimes exclusively. If another company already paid for that title in your country, the global service is not supposed to hand it to you. The block is how the platform keeps that promise to the rights holder. It is also how the platform keeps the promise in its own terms: the account is for the country you signed up in, and routing around the check is listed as a breach.
Butler’s practical conclusion follows from the contract, and it is the firmest part of the story. A service that detects the mismatch can refuse playback, limit the account, or close it. A lawsuit for breach of contract is theoretically available and, on the public record he could find, has stayed theoretical. The everyday sanction is the account, not a criminal charge.
What the copyright scholarship actually says
The How-To Geek piece quotes Marketa Trimble, writing in 2016, on the point that still structures the argument. Absent a contract term that forbids it, the status of getting around a geoblock is unclear across countries. There is no general statute that says “evading a region check is infringement.” Whether a region check counts as a technological protection measure, the thing anti-circumvention law was written for, is disputed. Computer-misuse statutes sometimes reach the edges. In some places the person who sells a tool whose purpose is to defeat the block can be liable even when the viewer’s own position is muddy. Trimble’s paper is Geoblocking, Technical Standards and the Law, on the UNLV scholarly commons.
A 2022 note by M’Bia Hortense De-Yolande, The Circumvention of Geo-Blocking and Copyrights Infringement, puts the same split in plainer language. One line of argument treats promotion of VPNs and proxies for this purpose as encouragement of infringement. Another says the viewer is only reaching a copy the rights holder already chose to stream, to a paying customer, and that the fight belongs in contract. Butler lands closer to the second line, with a caveat he does not soften: in substance you are watching something your local licensee did not sell you, and if that licensee exists, you did not pay them.
The United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act, at 17 U.S.C. § 1201, is the statute people reach for when they want the caveat to become a ban. It targets circumvention of a technological measure that controls access to a copyrighted work. The United Kingdom has a cousin in section 296ZA of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which covers devices, services, and acts aimed at circumventing effective technological measures. Both texts were written with copy-protection on discs and files in mind. Treating an IP-address check as that kind of lock is an argument, not a holding you can paste into every country. Disc-region codes produced a similar argument a generation earlier. Modifying a player, or buying one from another region, was widely treated as a format annoyance, and it was not prosecuted as piracy in the way unlicensed copying was.
A campaign report is not a statute
The pressure to collapse the categories is real, and it is not only academic. In 2026 the UK industry campaign BeStreamWise published “The Price of Piracy,” drawing on a JL Partners poll of 2,501 adults. The campaign’s definition of illegal streaming folds several different acts into one bucket: hacked streaming sticks, unofficial sites and torrents, unofficial live-sport links, social-media streams, and “accessing content only available in other countries using a VPN.” Coverage of the report, including a September summary on MyVPNHub, noted that this is an advocacy definition used to size a £1.35 billion annual loss figure. The document does not amend the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, and it does not create a new blocking power. It asks for awareness campaigns and a voluntary framework among platforms, access providers, and rights holders.
That definition still matters, because it is how a campaign backed by broadcasters and rights holders will talk to ministers and to advertisers. Once “VPN” sits in the same sentence as a hacked stick, a later proposal can treat the tunnel as the thing to regulate, rather than the unlicensed copy. Network engineers have been making the opposite point about sports piracy in particular. A VPN provider that is ordered to drop an address often drops a content-delivery address shared with ordinary sites. A tunnel that carries encrypted traffic, including encrypted client-hello data, often cannot see the hostname it would be told to block. NordVPN’s February 2026 note, Why targeting VPNs won’t fix sports piracy, is one statement of that limit. The engineering objection does not answer the copyright question. It does explain why “make the VPN do it” is a weak enforcement design.
Europe already split travel from shopping for a catalogue
European law has drawn a line that the slogan “VPN piracy” ignores. Regulation (EU) 2017/1128 on cross-border portability lets a subscriber who is temporarily in another EU member state keep the online content service they pay for at home. That is a right attached to a real trip, backed by checks the service is allowed to run, not a right to sign up as if you lived somewhere else. Regulation (EU) 2018/302, the geo-blocking regulation, forbids some forms of nationality-based discrimination in online shopping. Audiovisual services supplied on the basis of an exclusive territorial licence sit outside that regulation’s main obligations. Brussels has argued for years about whether those licences should be less territorial. It has not abolished them, and it has not passed a statute that equates a consumer VPN with an infringing copy.
Portability is the clean case. You already pay the licensee that holds your home country, you are physically elsewhere for a while, and the regulation tells the service to keep working. Choosing a server so the app believes you reside in a country where you do not subscribe is the case the terms of service were written to stop. Those are not the same journey, even when both of them involve the word “VPN” in a forum post.
What the tunnel changes, and what it cannot
A VPN changes the network path. The service sees the exit address, and your access provider sees an encrypted session to the VPN rather than a long list of destinations. That is the whole of the technical effect. It does not rewrite a production contract. It does not move a territorial exclusive from one broadcaster to another. It does not make a title you have not paid for into a title you have paid for. If the service’s own systems decide the session does not match the account’s country, playback stops, because the decision sits in the application, not in the packet you encrypted.
VPN Safe is built for that narrower effect: encrypted transit, a network that does not keep activity logs, and a path that is not your café or hotel address. It is not a catalogue, and it is not a way around someone else’s licence. The streaming service’s terms still govern the account you log into. If those terms forbid presenting another country’s address, the tunnel does not repeal them. If the use is an unlicensed copy rather than a paid subscription, the tunnel does not launder it.
Butler’s closing hope is that licensors drop the regional split instead of criminalising the workaround. That would be a change in how films are sold, not a change in how packets are routed. Until a legislature writes the rule in plain text, the durable description is the one his sources already support. The VPN is lawful in the ordinary case. The region check is a licensing and contract device. Breaking it can cost you the account. Calling it piracy is a campaign choice and, on the law as written, still a disputed one.
