EU Passes 'Content Portability' Rules Banning Geofencing (torrentfreak.com) 119
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo writes: The European Parliament has passed draft rules mandating 'content portability', i.e. the ability to take your purchased content and services across borders within the EU. Freedom of movement rules, which allow EU citizens to live and work anywhere in the EU, require that the individual is able to take their life with them -- family, property, and services. Under the new rules, someone who pays for Netflix or BBC iPlayer and then moves to another EU country will retain access to those services and the same content they had previously. Separately, rules to prevent geofencing of content within the EU entirely are also moving forward.
How would EU law apply? (Score:1)
If the UK has begun the brexit process, how would EU law apply to license fee paying iPlayer users?
Re:How would EU law apply? (Score:4, Informative)
The UK is still part of the EU until the Article 50 procedure has finished.
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We're used to being shafted by the free market. That won't change.
It sounds like you're about to be shafted by your government [independent.co.uk], not the free market, .
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Post hoc ergo propter hoc. No control group to compare against.
But with Thatcher Mk2 at the helm things can only get better!
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Unlikely to become law before the UK leaves the EU, so probably irrelevant. However, I suspect iPlayer wouldn't be affected anyway as you're not paying for the service, you're paying a TV license to receive broadcast TV in the UK. While you may not be allowed to use iPlayer without a TV license, that's not the service you're paying for. If you look at the briefing (linked in the article) it mentions the BBC specifically: "The draft regulation would apply to content services ... which are:
(e) free-of-charge
Solves one problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
This makes the whole bit of Cannes not considering streaming-only films a tempest in a teapot. France won't be able to retain its "can't stream for three years" laws in place and remain in alignment with the content portability rules (which I honestly thought already existed).
You misunderstand the rule (Score:3)
Good, but also bad (Score:1)
Re: Good, but also bad (Score:2)
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Since nothing prevents subscribing to a service from Western Europe in Eastern Europe, the prices have to be the same across the whole region. Major games on Steam are already too expensive for the poorer half of Europe.
You are misunderstanding that completely. The principle that this rule is derived from is that EU citizens are allowed to move freely within the EU. That implies that they can bring their property from one country to another. That implies that they can bring their Netflix with them. If you paid while you were an EU citizen in Latvia, and then you move to the UK, you can use Netflix in the UK (until March 2019). If you are a US citizen living in Latvia then you have no such right. If you are a Latvian citize
Ashamed (Score:1)
Man, the EU is kicking America's ass in terms of digital rights. Cookie laws, the right to be forgotten, now mandating that people can use what they buy anywhere. You guys got any room for a junior programmer?
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He probably just wants to leave a backward looking cultural shithole, which just elected a stupid, nasty bigoted asshole, for a civillised place. No more worries about health care, or being shot by an insane person either.
Wouldn't there be censorship issues involved? (Score:4, Interesting)
For instance, Germany censors media heavily when it contains Nazi imagery... ...does that mean it is now legal for you to access it in Germany if you acquired the access somewhere else in the EU?
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If I'm reading the article correctly, the portability rules affect streaming services, but not governments. A government can still legally censor content. To go back to your Germany example, you would still have access to your movies or games with Nazi imagery but further purchases of similar material would be heavily scrutinized.
I'm not sure how this would work with the BBC though. Can someone from the UK shed some light?
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For instance, Germany censors media heavily when it contains Nazi imagery... ...does that mean it is now legal for you to access it in Germany if you acquired the access somewhere else in the EU?
What makes you think that? The stuff isn't just censored, it's also illegal. (And saying 'Heil Hitler' in a pub in Germany means you will be thrown out, with your teeth following you a few seconds later).
Premiership Football (Score:3)
Oh, this'll be fun.
So people from Spain that have set top boxes and pay peanuts for rights to watch the English Premier League will be able to take their boxes with them to the UK and watch skipping the huge mark up that BT and Sky put on their services to watch the games.
Previously, this was against the law and people were fined for it, now it seems, that's fine.
The English Football League is going to be glad for Brexit now.
The undemocratic EU... (Score:2, Funny)
...is once again on the side of the consumer. It's as if the citizens of the EU actually had a say.
Re:Expect to see more content disappear (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that what happens in the US? Less content because it has to be licensed for every state?
Re:Expect to see more content disappear (Score:5, Informative)
It's a perfectly valid comparison to anyone who actually knows the history of the United States from colonial times through ~1800.
Re:Expect to see more content disappear (Score:5, Insightful)
"Legally or historically" includes historically. Presuming that you're the same anonymous coward, you set the criteria, so deal with it.
It's also contextually valid. You have two confederations of otherwise soverign states. One was the early United States. The other is the modern European Union. The states that became the United States often had constitutions before the U.S. Constitution was ratified. Hell, the states that became the early United States often had passed copyright laws well before the federal Copyright Act of 1790.
Your ignorance doesn't invalidate the validity of the comparison. It invalidates your opinion concerning the validity of the comparison, though.
Re:Expect to see more content disappear (Score:4, Interesting)
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Why do they call it a civil war then?
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The American civil war proved that an American State is not a country.
Calling it a civil war implies that it IS a country. A civil war being a war within a single country; which you knew, of course.
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It would have been called the Secessionary War, like the Revolutionary war was a 'revolution' theoretically (eh, it wasn't really a revolution, but we call it the Revolutionary War). The people of the southern states were trying to separate politically, not overthrow the federal government. Secessionary War makes more sense than Revolutionary War, for the wars in question.
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In many ways it is. Income Tax is the same rate in Liverpool as it is in London. TVA (sales tax, sort of) is the same in Paris as it is in Perpignan.
You can't say the same about Michigan and Montana.
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No. Are you equating states in the US to countries in the EU?
That would not be a valid comparison legally or historically.
For how the EU works it is a fair comparison. Many regulations and laws are pan EU. The EU is barely a single step from becoming a de-facto a United States of Europe which is why the UK wanted to leave. It is literally just the lack of an EU army and total monetary union that prevents it from being. Judicially and Legislatively it is pretty much the same as the US with each country having its own laws/regulations as well as EU wide laws/regulations no different from State and Federal legislation/regulations
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Not really. EU is a confederation with some federal structures but still a long way from becoming an actual federation, USA is clearly a federation and has been one longer than EU has existed.
Depends (Score:2)
For sports, at least, it's licensed by *market* - to watch local sports teams costs more for a carrier. You can get a major league baseball streaming package that lets you watch any game in the country *except* for the team nearest you. To watch your home game you have to subscribe to whichever cable channel holds the broadcast rights, usually Fox Sports or ESPN.
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Re:Expect to see more content disappear (Score:5, Informative)
The EU has already removed geofencing for a very large number of things. Goods, services, capital and people. There is nothing to stop someone in France taking a loan from a bank in Romania, or someone in Germany buying a DVD from an online store based in Latvia.
It's no different to Californians being able to buy stuff from Michigan if they want to. Or someone in London buying from a shop in Hull. Sky charges the same price to the most deprived council estate and multi-million pound town houses in Mayfair.
These businesses have a choice. Charge everyone the same as the law requires, or give up and make exactly â0.00.
Your scheme of charging different amounts for different languages would likely attract some legal action from the EU. The courts are not that dumb, and unlike the US they tend to implement the spirit of the law which is to be fair to all citizens and enforce freedom of movement.
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Your scheme of charging different amounts for different languages would likely attract some legal action from the EU.
On what basis? Translating a work from one language to another could be a very expensive undertaking. This EU policy is already economically naive, but expecting all translations of works to be provided at the same cost would be economically absurd.
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Re: Expect to see more content disappear (Score:4, Informative)
A sale does note equal requiring translation.
You have no idea what langauge your customer speaks, or if they speak many languages including the language your software supports.
If your software is English, and someone from Czech wants to buy your software, you are not required to translate it into Czech. As long as it's clear what langauge your software supports, and the customer understands this, and still wants to buy it there is no reason to translate it into the customers locale.
What makes you think you're required to support more than one language?
Now, if you go ahead and offer said translations available for sale, offering differing price points for different locales most definitely should be illegal. If you cant set your price at a point that encompasses all of the labour involved in creating it, then you simply misunderstand business, where the rule is always "Charge everyone more".
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You have no idea what langauge your customer speaks, or if they speak many languages including the language your software supports.
Well, I'm going to stop you right there, because marketing is a thing and finding out what your market wants is a rather large part of that thing. So in fact you often have a very good idea of what language(s) your customers speak.
What makes you think you're required to support more than one language?
Erm... The fact that I have done this, multiple times, with large scale projects, and I have seen detailed data on both market research before the fact and the effects that offering different translations had on sales in different locations after the fact?
Some people will be happy
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The Czech republic is a really bad example here, because, from my personal experience (visited the country often in the past, had a Czech girlfriend) the Czech generally aren't that good with foreign languages. My (not so good) Czech was often more helpful than my (quite good) English or (native) German.
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Translating a work from one language to another could be a very expensive undertaking
Since you used the word "could" and thus seem unsure about it, let me clear it up for you: it isn't. Only a few major languages have audio dubbing, and subtitles cost next to nothing to make.
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I'm not unsure about it at all. I've worked on a variety of professional projects, including software/UIs, written content and even video material, where translation has been an issue. Sometimes it's a significant expense. Sometimes it is relatively modest compared to the overall cost of the product or service. That's why I wrote "could".
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The vast majority of the expense is in the initial programming / setup / design of whatever you present to the user, even on TV. Once you have that down pat the rest can be sent to a translator for a few cents.
Synchronising subtitles to audio on screen costs more than translating those subtitles into 50 different languages and given the requirement for English closed captions it becomes a sunk cost.
The same with software. Re-writing code to translate everything into a different language is expensive. Writin
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lesser known = languages from cheaper countries.
It's almost like slashdot needs a preview button :-)
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The same with software. Re-writing code to translate everything into a different language is expensive. Writing a program to read the interface from a file is the same cost.
But writing code to read the interface from a file rather than encoding it in some other way may be a significant cost in itself. Perhaps more significantly, in internationalised UIs, we're typically not just talking about translating text. The whole infrastructure of your UI code may need to be different to support different time and date conventions, currency conventions, address and phone number formats, and so on. Again, the cost of generalising here may be quite significant, and it is not necessarily t
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But writing code to read the interface from a file rather than encoding it in some other way may be a significant cost in itself.
Sunk cost. There's a world outside America. If you want to be part of it you can either set yourself up for failure or do it efficiently allowing for easy translation afterwards.
Perhaps more significantly, in internationalised UIs, we're typically not just talking about translating text. The whole infrastructure of your UI code may need to be different to support different time and date conventions, currency conventions, address and phone number formats, and so on.
Have you programmed such UIs before? Most of this is handled by locales in the OS and in the underlying API. Beyond that the rest of it is very simplified too. There's two date standards, the US one and the rest of the world. If you're in the EU you've already sorted this out. Within the EU there's only 2 number / currency formats,
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There's a world outside America. If you want to be part of it you can either set yourself up for failure or do it efficiently allowing for easy translation afterwards.
I know; I'm not American. But you're grossly oversimplifying the commercial decisions here.
Have you programmed such UIs before? Most of this is handled by locales in the OS and in the underlying API.
Yes I have, and no it's not. You're talking about trivial details like the conventions for printing dates and times or getting the right currency symbol. That's the easy stuff. Even things like addressing aren't nearly as easy as you're making them out to be. (Obvious example: How will you match up your proposed address schema with the databases for validating payment credentials, which almost certainly won't be in th
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Not according to AniMoJo's interpretation, apparently.
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expecting all translations of works to be provided at the same cost would be economically absurd.
Why?
The cost of translating is relatively low. Translators don't get paid much, unless they are doing really specialist work. And the EU is familiar with this because it does a lot of translation work with its own material.
The only time it might get expensive is with dubbing, rather than just subtitles. Subtitles are so cheap and easy that anime fans do them for free, just because they enjoy it. Dubbing is more work, but even then you would find it very hard to justify charging more because the argument wou
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The cost of translating is relatively low. Translators don't get paid much, unless they are doing really specialist work.
I think you're assuming some sort of direct translation, for something like a document or the soundtrack of a movie. If you're talking about something more complicated, like the UI for a software product that includes other aspects that might need to be localised for each regional market, it's an entirely different question.
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"There is nothing to stop someone in France taking a loan from a bank in Romania"
Yeah right, other than they'd likely simply just say no unless you can prove who you are via DNA, fingerprints and 50 forms of ID and prove you don't have a criminal record and fill out 12 different forms and have them notarised via lawyers and embassies. And there will be a charge for that and you'll pay a higher interest rate to cover extra risk.
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The ability to sell financial services, with harmonised rules, over the entire EU is one of the four basic freedoms that comes with membership.
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I don't disagree with that, but having a freedom to do something doesn't mean you're going to want to do that thing.
Cross border costs = language, postage, security, risk. Business to business â volumes are likely enough for these costs to be minimal, but the overhead will likely be a much bigger % for niche non-business consumers.
Good luck living in France and trying to get a mortgage from a Romanian bank.
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The EU has open borders. Today for the ordinary people the borders are higher then every. Data is being blocked. Phone calls are extremely expensive in another EU state. 10 minutes of internet on a smartphone and you will lose hundreds of euro. But social dumping? No problem. Organized criminality? The more the merrier. Terrorists? Not all Muslims are like that you racist!. The EU is a failure.
This regional blocking has been a problem since digital television. I grew up with French and German televi
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Actually yes. The conflict between licensing on streaming services/satellite services/ conventional ppv has limited content that under the original television model would have been available and available as advertising support over the air television.
You can get more now, but it is via seperate purchases,
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Well refund the cash, then. (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want to stop someone using what they bought for, then you should refund the payments.
Which do you prefer? Geoblocking or keeping the cash?
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Posting to remove incorrect moderation.
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It's a bit more complicated that that, I'll give you an example.
Here in Italy, you cannot watch House of Cards on Netflix because Netflix sold its broadcasting rights to Sky before they entered the Italian market. Now, under these new rules, a German Netflix subscriber will expect to see it even if he moves to Italy. If Netflix allows that, it's liable to be sued by Sky, if they don't, it's now liable to be sued by the German subscriber. It's a legal conundrum I frankly don't know how to disentangle.
It is not really a problem - the German Netflix subscriber is still a German Netflix subscriber if he temporarily stays in Italy. So Netflix just needs to give up restricting streaming by IP (country) and instead determine what you are allowed to watch based on the user's account, i.e. they need to ask for your home address and link it to your account. I guess they then just need to find a way to verify that home address, otherwise everybody will just sign up using a fake address from a country which offers
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IANAL. But I'll go out on a limb here and guess that the illegality of an action pretty much voids any contract about performing the aforementioned action in a similar way to Acts of God, force majeur, action of the Queen's enemies etc.
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Not really. Since this is an EU directive that has to be transposed to law by each member state, Italy will have to allow it by law and Sky has no claim (and this particular directive had a deadline to be transposed by April 2016, a year ago... this part, online rights, is just being addressed now).
If for some absurd reason Netflix is actually sued, any court will just defer it to the ECJ (European Court of Justice), that in turn would refer to the directive and do a face palm on how would a case like that
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It will presumably still be possible for content providers to supply content to EU nations, unless they have existing exclusive licensing deals with intermediaries from some of those nations already that would now be in competition with their own offering intended for another nation but now applicable EU-wide.
What this will do is mean that selling at a lower price in the less well-off nations is no longer acceptable, so the result is likely to be that some content will now only be legally available to those
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For that to be the case, it would have to be sold at below cost in those poorer countries, since a profit of 1p is still more than a revenue of 0 when you've already paid to produce the goods or service.
That doesn't follow if pricing in the poorer and richer states is artificially forced to the same level by law.
Which would be dumping and proof that the free market is broken and cannot and will not work.
These laws mean it's not a free market. They artificially constrain pricing so that suppliers can't offer what consumers want at a price they are willing to pay for it. They call it a "single market" but in reality when purchasing power is so different in different parts of it, it's not naturally a single market at all.
Re: Expect to see more content disappear (Score:1)
Does this mean the piratebay has to be unblocked in the countries that (tried to) block it?
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That is not going to happen. Every sale lost due to lack of offering is money not made. At the moment, the content mafia still succeeds in hypnotizing everybody into thinking they are important, but the reality is that anybody providing entertainment is a beggar and dependent on the goodwill of their potential benefactors (i.e. customers).
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So instead of you getting your content everywhere, for most content this effects you will get it no-where.
Only for the people who actually want to pay for it. Everyone else will just torrent it.
Re:Expect to see more content disappear (Score:5, Interesting)
Like they could afford to pass up the entire EU market, it's 741 million people and fairly wealthy ones at that. They will comply. While they're fairly liberal when it comes to international restrictions like non-EU vs EU countries, inside the EU there's very strong forces to make it one united market. Most recently they bludgeoned the cell phone operators, you can now roam the whole EU like home for one price. This is the second half, you can enjoy every content like that home. So once this is firmly put in place, I can go anywhere in Europe and watch anything for the same price I could at home. Despite Brexit and all that the "United States of Europe" project is very much on. I'll admit it also has some very clear upsides despite the democratic deficit it has.
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Right. They'll take 100% of nothing rather than 95% of something.
You were is such a froth about OMG Gubmints that you totally failed to think it through.
Why do you think contracts trump laws? Netflix will either suck it up, or pull out and have to refund any subscr
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Huh? Government can't control broadcast TV either.
Of course, many European nation has a government-operated broadcaster. They have full control over that one, obviously. But not the 3-4 competing privately owned sports/movie channels. Or any of the neighbour country channels that they're capable of receiving.
Perhaps taxing broadcasters it easier than taxing streamers - but that's about it.