EU Lawmakers To Push Audio-Visual Sector on Geoblocking (techcrunch.com) 45
European Union lawmakers are considering whether current rules aimed at limiting the practice of geoblocking across the bloc should be extended to cover access to streaming audio-visual content. From a report: Access to services like Netflix tends to be gated to individual EU Member States, meaning Europeans can be barred from accessing libraries of content offered elsewhere in the region. So if you're trying to use your Netflix subscription to access the service after moving to another Member State, or want to access inventory offered by Netflix elsewhere in Europe, the answer is typically a big fat no, as we've reported before. This undermines the core concept of the EU's Single Market (and the Digital Single Market -- aka the frictionless ecommerce end-goal which rules such as those limiting geoblocking aim to deliver). The Commission is alive to ongoing issues around online access to audio-visual content. In a review of the two-year-old Geo-blocking Regulation published today, it says it will kick off discussions with the audiovisual sector on ways to improve consumer access to this type of copyrighted content across the bloc.
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-2, Poor Troll, must troll harder.
You're a disgrace to your username!
EU has to change its rules first (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just add more local content.
In practice though the local content rules will probably just get updated to reflect these changes. Remember that the EU can't make laws, those are made by individual countries. So when say Spain makes a new law implementing the EU directive they will just have it update the locally produced content rule to account for the increased total amount of content that Netflix has to offer.
Re:EU has to change its rules first (Score:4, Interesting)
Just add more local content.
The point being made is that with the way the laws are currently constructed you can't "just add more local content" to solve the problem. Right now, a number of member states have laws requiring that X%—typically 10-30% if I recall correctly—of the service's library must be locally produced, which is only possible because each nation's library is considered independently of the others. Were they to switch to a single, shared library of content, it wouldn't be mathematically possible for dozens of nations to each receive the double-digit percentage of representation that they require today. E.g. If France, Poland, Slovakia, and Spain each require that 30% of a streaming service's catalog come from their respective nations, it would be literally impossible for that service to comply in a single market scenario.
So, yes, the "local content rules will need to be updated to reflect the changes", but even if these member states were to reduce the percent required, it wouldn't change that 100% is still as high as any service can go in total, so we're talking about a zero-sum game in which any percent required by one country must necessarily come at the expense of the others. With 27 member nations, even just 4% each would exceed what is mathematically possible, and yet if just 4% of the catalog were in, say, French, I suspect France would be none too happy that 96% of the catalog was in other languages and from other cultures (I'm picking on France here because of their well established penchant for protecting their language and culture).
Alternatively, countries could switch from a proportional representation to a quantitative representation, but that comes with its own headaches. If you write a law that says streaming services must offer, say, 10,000 hours of content in your country's language in order to operate in your country, that might be a drop in the bucket for a company like Netflix, but you'd have just prevented local streaming services from ever getting off the ground in your country. Requiring a minimum quantity of content for any new entrants would have a chilling effect on the industry, thus entrenching the incumbents or ensuring that the only companies capable of satisfying it are the ones who start elsewhere and are able to build up massive catalogs before entering your country.
I'm not saying it's impossible or a bad idea to implement a single market across the EU—far from it—but I am saying that it would take careful consideration and is quite a bit more complicated than your "just add more local content" suggestion would have us believe.
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Under a single market, "local content" would be "any content from the single market" therefore it shouldn't be a problem at all. Foreign content would be anything produced outside of the single market.
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Under a single market, "local content" would be "any content from the single market"
That may well be the case. I don't know enough to say.
therefore it shouldn't be a problem at all.
This statement does not follow from the previous. I sincerely doubt that France or the other countries with laws already on the books designed to protect their languages and cultures when it comes to streaming services would be happy to go along with this idea. If what you're saying is true, it would put local content producers in direct competition with major centers for filmmaking (e.g. Prague, which has worked in tandem with Hollywood for years, hence
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People in a given country will generally prefer to consume content in their own language as it's easier and more comfortable. Many people (myself included) cannot stand dubbing, and subtitles distract you from the actual action.
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I really don't see how your post addresses the problem I'm raising.
My entire point was that it's far more difficult than AmiMoJo was suggesting to craft laws that simultaneously grant access to all content as a single market while also protecting one's culture. I agree that people "generally prefer to consume content in their own language" (at least in the short term), but that statement is merely a way of putting your head in the sand by ignoring the need to protect one's culture that many of these countri
Re: EU has to change its rules first (Score:3)
This is essentially the situation you e
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That would still require individual governments to ratify that, since the laws are usually "X% of content must be produced in France" or "Y% must feature German landmarks". Each country will have to decide it.
It also comes down to copyright laws itself - some countries have censorship laws that require certain
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One of the issues with Netflix, and a number of US based content companies, is that they don't do a good job of allowing you to search for movies or music based on a specific region. It is usually comes down to local, US content, not-local.
If Netflix normalised their pricing across the EU and made their content pan-European (pan-EU here), to the point where you can select content based on language and region, it would be a huge improvement. This way if I am Italian, but in France, but can I still get access
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Sounds like a good chance for a region specific company to form. Franco-Flix, Spanard-Flix, etc. Why does everyone need to go to netflix again?
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Sounds like a good chance for a region specific company to form. Franco-Flix, Spanard-Flix, etc. Why does everyone need to go to netflix again?
Euroflix would be better. People should get to watch things in their language, no matter which EU country they are in.
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Requirements for "local" content apply to public broadcasters, not people watching Netflix etc.
There is a case to be made for both banning local geoblocks (it is a form of market distortion) and for leaving them alone (complicated licensing issues), but this has very little to do with "local" requirements.
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Lots of requirements for certain amounts of local produced content. How can they allow ALL content and yet maintain they correct ratios???
I believe those restrictions are tied to broadcasting licences and I don't think web only needs those (this would be regulated at the country level so it might be wrong on that in some member states).
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I know only of France who demands that a certain ratio of domestically produced music in their broadcasts. That is due to a long standing linguistic nationalism in France they take pride in. But that's not true for many other countries in Europe.
Doing some research on the matter I only found that there's a pressure to comply to some proposal to have at least 20% of EU content. Now that is still a stupid thing in m
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My guess is that they'll modify the old law as they do this. The old law said, "30% had to be local", my guess is the new law will say "30% has to be EU (possibly subdivided among EU countries)".
Or maybe the new law will say if you pay for Netflix France, you can still access it in Germany (which is the use case they describe), so it's 30% French, 70% whatever Netflix shows in France. Maybe if you sign up for Netflix EU, you get to ch
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the local content laws are at a national level. e.g. France has specific local content laws.
The 'no geoblocking' law would be at an EU level.
The EU would have to come up a rule regarding local content that was consistent with the no geoblocking. Possibly xx % EU content, possibly 'show what you like'.
Of course, they'd have to go to battle with France and perhaps others if they were to over-ride the existing national laws.
Re: EU has to change its rules first (Score:3)
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They can't. That will have to be a part of national regulation to be relaxed, or "content from within EU" will have to at least partially replace "content from France" in legal formulations.
I hope they succeed (Score:2)
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I mean, it's kinda trivial to unwind complex legal things if you write the laws.
p>Alternatively, they could make it so you could log into "Netflix - France" from anywhere in the EU. That would be even better, because then Netflix and Amazon could each have exclusive rights to "A" in essence throughout the EU. The value of country specific exclusive rights would crash, and we'd get more streaming competition.
Force private sector to set up a clearinghouse (Score:2)
And of course if the commission issues rules without taking the existing landscape into account (say a rule that says "streaming titles must be the same across the EU" without anything to force a central rights clearing house or the like) the result becomes that the titles will be reduced greatly to whatever set can easily be done across the whole EU.
A law like this means owners of territorial exclusive licenses would no longer be able to exploit their licenses anywhere in the Union. This would encourage these firms to set up a private-sector rights clearinghouse in order to be able to collect any royalty greater than zero.
They have to (Score:2)
People are using VPNs in droves to circumvent that and so they can't spy as easily on them.
Good (Score:5, Interesting)
For example: Why should Germans pay €8 for identical (English undubbed/unsubbed) movies which Polish people only pay €4 for? If you want to sell to a greater pool of customers then lower your prices, if you can maximise profits selling to a more upmarket audience, then keep your prices high. It's that simple.
Globalisation is a double-edged sword and companies will have to live with the consequences of the mess they have created through their tremendous greed.
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I'd get YouTube Premium if they offered it at a reasonable price. In Russia it's less than £2/month, in the UK it's over 6x more expensive and I don't want most of the stuff it comes with.
Some people get the Russian price using a VPN but I'm not going to risk my Google account as I use it for email.
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I mean, it gets more revenue for the selling company, that's why. Price discrimination does that. Same reason a gold plated iPhone has (or at one point, had) an extra 0 on it to charge the rich more.
But, more to the point, why should Polish people (who make significantly less money) not be able to watch movies? I wouldn't expect everyone in the US to pay the astronomical rent in SF or
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I am fundamentally in favour of globalisation, where the basic human values we all hold in common are recognised in a consistent, homogenous way, while still allowing cultural traditions to be mutually respected. This extends to legal systems, methods of trading, the whole shebang. However, the EU does not support globalisation or even offer the promised representation of individual citizens. The closes
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I'm unfamiliar with your usage of "government" and "civil service", and therefore unable to really understand your objection. To my knowledge, the civil service is an unelected part of government, normally under the executive branch, that remains in place regardless of election results and exists to implement the directives from on high and literally make sure trains run on time and other stuff that has to happen. Or, more accurately, the vast majority of the NHS, in my understanding, would be part of th
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
Brexit is a double-edged sword up the arse and the UK will have to live with the consequences of the mess its supporters have created through their tremendous spite, xenophobia and petty nationalism.
So why is it legal? (Score:3, Interesting)
This undermines the core concept of the EU's Single Market (and the Digital Single Market -- aka the frictionless ecommerce end-goal which rules such as those limiting geoblocking aim to deliver).
So make geoblocking illegal already. Or at least, make it illegal to use it to restrict "products" (real or imaginary) to subsets of the EU. Otherwise nobody should believe in your "end goal".
Re:So why is it legal? (Score:5, Insightful)
In response to an article about the first step to making geoblocking of streaming services illegal: "So make geoblocking illegal already. " *slow clap* That's a good idea, I bet they get on that in negative time.
Re: So why is it legal? (Score:2)
They don't want to make it illegal, they just want to decide who can do it.
I know a service even better than Netflix! (Score:2)