Good question, good, but difficult to answer.
Firstly, there is nothing illegal about the MyTelly service, from a technical standpoint it is merely a proxy service that allows you to route bits of your internet connection through certain servers.
The real issue here is whether or not it is legal to use the service to watch, for example, a Hulu show that would normally only be available to view in the USA. We are confident that this activity is not illegal, however, it is an infringement of terms of service to which you agreed to when you signed up to Hulu.
So what are the possible repercussions of this? Well, Hulu would be quite justified in terminating your account with them, but then again, you are paying Hulu, so whilst they could close your account, they are unlikely to do this and in the five years we have been operating in this space, to the best of our knowledge, this has never happened.
As for the owners of whatever media you are viewing, they are getting paid by Hulu for your views, which is infinitely preferable to you watching a torrent-ed or pirated version.
From a technical point of view, if someone wanted to disrupt services such as ours, or even to shut them down completely, it would not be difficult to do. Any media provider can see exactly who is consuming their content and the paths that it takes to reach them, and it would take very little effort to block our access. Again, the fact that they don’t, speaks volumes.
In summary, it is not illegal to use our service. It is most likely an infringement of whatever terms and conditions you accepted when you were granted access to the media you want to watch, but the maximum penalty for infringing those terms is most likely termination of your account or access rights.
DISCLAIMER – We are not lawyers, we are techies. We’ve spoken to a few lawyers over the years and we’ve followed whatever news comes up in this area, but this is only our opinion, and you know what they say about opinions!
