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End Geoblocking
- matthewmacleod 10y agoI can't agree more. I appreciate that there are complex reasons for it to exist regarding legacy content licensing deals, but as a single market the EU absolutely should not permit artificial trading barriers between member states. The sooner the better.
- ivanstame 10y agoI agree totally. Coming form Serbia a lot of things are blocked for me...it's not fair.
- kozak 10y agoI have to pirate some intellectual properly simply because it's impossible for me to legally obtain it for any price. That's the reality of living in a "wrong" country.
- wfunction 10y agoIf it was made available to you for 1000x its local price would you then stop pirating it? If not, then is the lack of "any" price the problem? Or do you have higher expectations than you've stated here?
- izacus 10y agoHow about being made available under the same price people in other countries pay and not being treated like a second class human?
- ucaetano 10y agoDifferent countries have different costs, taxes, wealth and willingness to pay.
- marcosdumay 10y agoWhat difference does it make when the people on those countries send you money through an international credit card?
- kodablah 10y agoAlso with ad-based viewing (e.g. YouTube), different countries have significantly different ad conversion ratios.
- wfunction 10y ago> How about being made available under the same price people in other countries pay and not being treated like a second class human? To be clear, are you saying there is some kind of fundamental human principle that if some product or service is made available to N members of the public, it MUST be made available to ALL people worldwide at the same price (with perhaps adjustment for local differences in tax, etc.)? Do you not feel the vendor also has every right and privilege to NOT bother doing such a thing for your convenience? And does it really seem 100% fair to the vendor that you're forcing them to choose between either (1) letting you steal their product, or (2) going through the trouble of making it available to you? Do people not have a right to produce things for less than 100% of the world population without allowing them to get stolen by the rest?
- kozak 10y agoLet's say, at 2x the USA price it would still be less hassle for me to pay than to pirate. I'm quite modest middle class in my country.
- zanny 10y agoThe countries that don't have this material are also the ones where you can pirate with impunity. The only ones losing in that situation is the content producer, because you can get all their stuff for free with impunity and they are missing out on revenue on purpose. I do not believe it is proper to be "sad" about the state of affairs. The content producers are obviously profitable to make their material in the first place knowing in advance billions of people will have no legal avenue to purchase it. They make the rational choice to produce solely based off the potential customer base, which simply does not include you if you are outside the Amero-European media sphere, which is only nice for you since you can then get it for free.
- stevetursi 10y ago> The countries that don't have this material are also the ones where you can pirate with impunity. That isn't true, or at least wasn't true two years ago when I wanted to watch Black Mirror in the US and there was no legal way to obtain it here.
- jordigh 10y agoYou just had to label your own products in a matter that confused consumers that you were selling the same thing as someone else, didn't you? Or perhaps you labeled them to indicate that they were created in a region that you didn't have the right to claim?
- gst 10y agoThis site looks geoblocked to me - getting a 503 error: https://imgur.com/9AYpo5N https://imgur.com/9AYpo5N
- isseu 10y agocouldn't support love
- jzymbaluk 10y agoI'm seeing the same, I'm assume it's being hugged to death instead of actively blocked
- reitanqild 10y agoHappened to me as well but got it on second try.
- JulianMorrison 10y agoIf you're in the UK, vote "remain" or expect to be ten times as geoblocked.
- maffydub 10y agoCan you provide a reference for the "ten times as geoblocked" please? I support "remain", but hyperbole from both the leave and remain sides has made the referendum a bit of a farce.
- matthewmacleod 10y agoI support "remain", but hyperbole from both the leave and remain sides has made the referendum a bit of a farce. No argument with that, and maybe it's hyperbole, but I'd really expect exactly that situation to arise. It's certainly unlikely to make it any easier!
- JulianMorrison 10y agoI don't need to provide a reference because it's obvious that negotiations of rights are currently on an EU basis (because that's the big legal bloc) and they would suddenly have to be UK-specific, and what big company can be bothered to prioritize that?
- c3o 10y agoUnfortunately negotiations of rights are on a country by country basis. Copyright is not unified nor properly harmonized across the EU (...yet?). To show copyrighted content to all of Europe you need licenses for 28 territories. This might change, or at least gain some new exceptions ("roaming" for your Netflix account will come for sure; the other measures this campaign demands are up in the air at this point). These improvements of course would not apply if the UK leaves.
- evgen 10y agoWhile I love reading Süddeutsche Zeitung online as much as the next guy, I can't quite see how anyone else in the UK cares too much about being geoblocked from seeing Polish dramas or those wonderful shows being produced by RAI. On this particular political divide, the Leave campaign could make a better argument with "force the French to pay more to see our wonderful _British_ broadcasting corp shows"...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- thejosh 10y agoAustralians also know this pain..
- Cub3 10y agoAnd get called out as Pirates for trying to circumvent Geo Blocks
- buro9 10y agoThe example given is the BBC. A service funded by licence fee payers who are resident in the UK. Why should a service, that is advert free and wholly paid for by the UK licence payers, be free to people elsewhere? You may react that it need not be free... i.e. on different terms. And it is, BBC Worldwide exists and material is available for licencing by other television networks, one may watch Top Gear globally. I'm not even sure that I agree that geoblocking should be removed for commercial copyright holders. Is it being proposed that all copyrighted material be subjected to compulsory universal licensing? Actually, let's change the question: What is being proposed? It's fine to say "end geoblocking", yes... down with that, we can all agree it's a pain. But there doesn't seem to be a solution being proposed to say what replaces the existing legal enforcement of copyrights and the resulting contracts which today have led to geoblocking. Edit: I mentioned the BBC because that was the example given. The general gist of this comment isn't solely about the BBC. What is being proposed?
- virtualSatai 10y agoWouldn't it make sense for the BBC to sell their service to people outside of the UK? Aren't they allowed to? Or do they already?
- ucaetano 10y agoThey do that already, through licensing.
- dceddia 10y agoTo individuals, though? Licensing works great if some big company deems it profitable enough to license the show I want to watch, but isn't a full solution otherwise.
- ucaetano 10y agoSure, but does the additional cost of licensing to individuals make economic sense? It almost sounds as if people want companies to be forced to make their content available at a desirable price to anyone in the planet, no matter the cost of it. In other words, people are talking as if they have the "right" to see that content.
- eggman 10y agogeoblocking is better than some other types of blocking i can think of
- magicfractal 10y agoGeoblocking is economic segregation of knowledge and culture based on luck (if you had the luck of being born on a country with high material standards and strong currency). Free flow of information is one of the easiest ways we can reduce the global wealth inequality gap and have a more stable society.
- pg_is_a_butt 10y ago503 service unavailable... i guess you did it!
- tobltobs 10y agoPlease do not make another law. Most of the laws produced by the EU in regards to the internet do usually not help anything, but just place another burden on the shoulders of small to midsized companies. Look at the VATmess or the stupid cookie law. Some possible outcome could be that you are forced to offer your service in the whole EU, even if you are just a small, online fan shop for a second liga soccer club. All those EU laws usually just help the big multinational companies to keep startups out of the market. The EU should stop producing any laws at all and concentrate on harmonising the endless supply of inconsistent laws in their member states.
- djsumdog 10y ago> EU in regards to the internet do usually not help anything "We use cookies to blah blah..." Has that peace of legislation actually improved privacy or just make websites more annoying?
- tobltobs 10y agoIt didn't improve privacy a bit, but it produced costs and enabled lawyers (at least in Germany) to earn some easy money with a new breed of "Abmahnungen".
- elcapitan 10y agoI would say it worsens the situation because it trains people to just click on every banner that says something like that. People are lazy and I would argue that once you have to do that a dozen times a day you are probably more likely to also give up on even base-checking EULAs, new service conditions etc.
- taejo 10y agoThat particular piece of legislation is just annoying. Some of the other privacy legislation is very good, though, as is the extension of consumer protection laws to online shops.
- zanny 10y ago
- guelo 10y agoAmerican companies in Hollywood sign business contracts with American companies in Silicon Valley and these Europeans think they can tell them what they can do. People are under the strange impression that multi-million dollar entertainment products are some kind of human right. If a shoe company decided they weren't going to sell in Europe people wouldn't get all indignant like this.
- xanderstrike 10y agoI agree with you 100%. I think the reason people get huffy about online content vs. shoes for example, is there's no _technical_ reason why a video I have hosted in US shouldn't be watchable in the UK, and people intuitively understand that. There are only regulatory and political reasons which are difficult to understand and therefore get boiled down to "bullshit."
- izacus 10y agoBeing able to carry (or buy online) a bought DVD/BluRay from USA and watch it EU and then being denied the ability to buy and stream of that exact same content is the definition of "bullshit".
- DasIch 10y agoIf American companies want to sell in the EU, they have to follow EU rules. They can't afford not to, so they're going to have to follow them.
- 10y ago
- tangue 10y agoAndroid is useless where I live because all paid apps (or with an in app purchase) are impossible to install. I'm still wondering why Google doesn't want my money, it's just another Visa card afger all. (Apple store works perfectly)
- sixseven 10y agoWhere do you live?
- tangue 10y agoReunion Island - (french oversea territory)
- c3o 10y agoI read that since your uplink is via the African continent, geolocation by IP often assumes you are there, rather than in an EU member state. Is that true, and could you share some experiences of being blocked (maybe even from French content)? Happy to email about this christopher.clayATjuliareda.eu
- dublinben 10y agoThere are very many good Android apps that do not cost anything, nor do they have any in-app purchases. You shouldn't write off the entire platform just because they won't let you buy apps.
- tangue 10y agoThere are really cool free apps but they're drowned into scams and poor clones. And most games are impossible to install. Feels like having Windows and being stuck with minesweeper and sharewares floppys.
- elcapitan 10y agoAlthough I find geoblocking super annoying as well (personally), I don't see a compelling argument why site owners should not have the right to decide freely who can access their page and who not? It's they who provide the service, so it should be their call.
- DasIch 10y agoThis isn't about private people it's about businesses. Those haven't been allowed to discriminate based on many things for a long time. This proposal merely pushes that further. This isn't the huge change you want to make it out to be.
- elcapitan 10y agoI'd be happy to get rid of other overregulation as well. Laws are man-made, and therefore they can be changed by man.
- PeterisP 10y agoWhy yes, laws can be changed by man, and that's why they have made these customer protection laws and will likely change them to be even stricter in future. At least in the EU, there is strong support for that.
- elcapitan 10y agoUnless they do the opposite and people get all whiny about "neoliberalism" and so on.
- PeterisP 10y agoIt's considered a form of unreasonable discrimination - if someone comes to your shop and you decline to serve them because of their nationality, citizenship or country of residence then that (at least if all that is within EU) is illegal. You don't have to open your shop in every country, but if an Italian comes to an UK shop, they have rights to not be refused service. The same should apply if some online customer appears to have an Italian creditcard, IP address or real world address - it shouldn't make any difference, it's supposed to be a single market within EU.
- sandworm101 10y agoGeoblocking isn't the problem. It's just the symptom. The real issue is restrictive copyright BS. Often when a show is block from a country (ie Canada) it isn't because the producer doesn't want to let Canadians watch. It's because some tiny bit of music in the show required a license, which the producer purchased from a clearing house, which in turn was only authorized to sell licenses within some tiny area. I believe this is part of the reason so many American Netflix shows are blocked in canada.
- PeterisP 10y agoThe proposed changes exactly address this cause - any the geoblocking provisions in contracts (including previous contracts) would be null and void, so the producer would be legally able to distribute the content across the whole EU under the same conditions as for the EU part (e.g. UK) they originally had, while ignoring any geographical restrictions. It's just as in other industries where you can't legally limit your wholesalers/distributors to sell within a particular area only, that's a violation of anti-trust laws.
- amq 10y agoRecently I had to unsubscribe from Netflix, because it started to block VPNs properly (geoblocking). Sorry guys, but I'm not going to give up privacy just for you. And I can't switch it off on app basis, because VPN is done for my whole home network on router.
- ericdykstra 10y agoThis seems like a worthy cause, but wouldn't it be easier to just make a browser that spoofs location in an undetectable way? I've recently run into some sites that I can't trick even with a VPN and using Chrome dev tools to spoof location. (As a side note, if anyone knows of ways to get around more sophisticated geoblocking, please let me know)
- bruceb 10y agoOne of the most interesting arguments is: "Linguistic minorities, long-term migrants, exchange students, etc. – 1 in 10 Europeans[ELEN] – are denied access to their culture online." Of course no geo blocking means English and American content is even more available which could lead to even less linguistic and cultural diversity. This could be a classic case of be careful what you wish for.
- c3o 10y agoUS content is already pretty widely available. Currently, the Danish minority in Germany can watch the 80%-non-EU-made content in the German Netflix repertoire just fine -- but they are blocked from watching the Danish public broadcasters' content online, which is a significant chunk of the content that exists in their language/from their culture. Remember that US-only services could continue to geoblock all Europeans even if geoblocking was eliminated in the EU. In practice it might give these German Danes access to, I dunno, twice the US content they can watch today, and maybe 5 or 10 times more Danish content. Plus 100 times more Estonian, Portuguese, Maltese, and so on. I can't follow the argument that this would lead to less cultural diversity, not more.
- 794CD01 10y agoAlso, end locks on doors.
- tobltobs 10y agoBefore the EU could forbid geoblocking they would have to introduce a common level for IPP. And I am pretty sure nobody (apart of the copyright holders) would be pleased with that.
- Unibod 10y agoThe BBC makes great content and it costs money to do so. It is a large organisation and suffers from lack of agility so changing the funding model is very difficult. Great programmes are made [as well as the usual dross] but to maintain their brand they must continue to do this and need a guaranteed revenue stream Overlaid is the reality that the BBC is a political issue in the same way that the NHS is. Changes are not enacted by the BBC alone, it requires government approval of the direction of travel. The pillars of the UK [or maybe just England] are the NHS and the BBC. This may be a broken model in the current World and many people may understand this, but changing it will take a generation of persuading a nation that the delivery method should change. Murdoch has been trying for at least 25 years.
- ibn-alfatal 10y agoGood guy EU: sensors the internet for its citizens, gets upset when sensored by third parties.
- studentrob 10y agoWait.. Could this law have a side effect of hurting potential YouTube competitors? Right now we are only concerned about major players, like YouTube, Netflix, etc. With the proposed law, a smaller video service might not be able to focus on a smaller region. Focusing on a smaller group could give a competitor the chance to build up notoriety among that group. For example, in 2050, each town has its own website capable of hosting videos. The town videos have ads specific to the local population. The pricing of ads could be controlled by that town. For this to work, it might be desirable to be able to limit consummation of the videos to the townspeople. Bandwidth is also used to serve content. If you're fine with YouTube/Google and Facebook being in charge of ad-pricing from now until the end of time, then this law would not disrupt that vision. But if you expect YouTube to pay different rates, or have any competition, this law might create unreasonable restrictions for new competition.