5 ms·

I do hope EU gets on top of Apple/Google/Netflix/HBO/etc soon. It's supposed to be One Market, yet these all impose territory restrictions where content in Spai

I do hope EU gets on top of Apple/Google/Netflix/HBO/etc soon. It's supposed to be One Market, yet these all impose territory restrictions where content in Spain is not necessarily available in France and vice versa.

azernik 9y ago
They're working on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Single_Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Single_Market Note that the issue is rulemaking, not enforcement. The Single Market is a statement of principle, not a legally-applicable regulation, and needs specific rules to be made to put it into effect in different markets.
- bdhess 9y ago
  I would also add that the original intent was to remove government-imposed barriers to trade between the members (elimination of duties, regulation, etc). Whereas the unavailability of certain content based on location is almost certainly the result of a contractual arrangement between content makers and distributors rather than a government-imposed limit.
  - azernik 9y ago
    The scope of the Single Market is broader than that - it includes standardization of weights and measures, standardization of product names, etc. - rules that apply to private companies, and are meant to break down extra-legal obstacles to trade.
    - bdhess 9y ago
      > The scope of the Single Market is broader than that - it includes standardization of weights and measures, standardization of product names, etc Well historically individual states had their own regulations regarding weights/measures and product names, and that authority was transferred to the new market when it was created. These types of regulations ensure a level playing field between buyers and sellers, and are an important function of any regulated market. You know what you're getting when you buy a 750 mL bottle of Chateauneuf. It doesn't necessarily follow that the maker of the Chateauneuf ought to be required to distribute it in a particular geographic territory.
      - richrichardsson 9y ago
        > It doesn't necessarily follow that the maker of the Chateauneuf ought to be required to distribute it in a particular geographic territory. Exactly. There are some awesome products that I can't buy in the UK, because no-one imports and sells them, that are available in France etc., and vice versa. Of course I'm free to go and buy them myself and bring them back without duty (for the next couple of years at least, after that, on vera).
        simonh 9y ago
        But this isnt about requiring Chateauneuf to do anything, its about restrictions on what people who buy Chateauneuf can do with their bottles, where they can take them and who they can sell them on to.
      - tremon 9y ago
        It doesn't necessarily follow that the maker of the Chateauneuf ought to be required to distribute it in a particular geographic territory. True, but the maker of Chateauneuf cannot prohibit a reseller from exporting its products to that territory either. That content-providers have been able to prohibit this, is only because of copyright. And since copyright is a government-granted monopoly, it does follow that the EU can use its monopoly grant to enforce that same single-market principle for digital content.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - toyg 9y ago
    In some countries it is government-imposed, in the sense that national authorities exist in law, which will hoover up royalties before distributing them to creators and performers. This requires that any performance or distribution is recorded by (and paid to) such authority. At the moment, if an entity in the Italian market shows a French movie to Italian audiences, the Italian authority collects royalties before sending them to the registered owners of such rights; but what happens when a German entity shows the same film to Italian audiences? Does it pay Italian authorities or follow German rules? That's the sticky point from a legal point of view, which needs European legislation and cooperation from all involved parties (investors, producers, distributors, streamers etc) to be resolved. Since the industry benefits from market segmentation though, they are dragging their feet. For example, it's usually better to sell the same film to a different distributor in each country, rather than a single one serving all markets - 28 smaller paydays will often tally up to levels that one single Euro-wide agreement is unlikely to reach; and some films will do well only in certain countries, so might be penalized at EU level.
    - matt4077 9y ago
      I don't quite see how this is different from, for example, sales tax. Or, actually the status quo: if you're a Polish company organising a music festival in Italy you follow Italian law. That principle won't change just because it's a streaming service, for the obvious reason that anything else would lead to content distributers shopping around for the cheapest jurisdiction. Regarding the distributers' wish for market segmentation: That's a perfectly understandable reason, and it will become illegal rather soonish. Sure, you can chose you customers. But you won't be able to make their nationality part of the equation much longer. The public will profit rather obviously. Personally, I don't even care about any changes in pricing. Most annoying are companies segmenting the market along borders, and then never actually signing a local distributor. Or somehow only selling the translated movie etc. One caveat for practical reasons will be sports rights. It's just not possible to set a single price for, say, the British Premier League games that works everywhere: either it's but a fraction of today's prices, or nobody outside the UK would consider buying a subscription* * UK example for demonstration purposes only. Will not be implemented. Search for better examples underway.
- WilliamDhalgren 9y ago
  that's an optimistic way to frame the situation; there's heavy opposition from the content industry to limits to geoblocking, and unsurprisingly the industry seems to have support within the commission (Oettinger at least - perhaps the fact he now left the Digital Economy and Society position helps). I'm not confident at all they'll be able to completely ban geoblocking in one go. Hopeful they will at least poke some holes in it this round. Most parts of the single market needed a couple of revisions of a directive (quite a few years removed) before liberalizing a particular market fully..
  - matt4077 9y ago
    > Oettinger at least - perhaps the fact he now left the Digital Economy and Society position helps). It certainly has lowered my blood pressure–he's now in a much more important position. But that means that people will actually stop him if he continues to embarrass himself in the way he previously did. There'll be exceptions for sports broadcasts, and maybe other content where there is a reason legitimising a difference in prices. For example: a french 24h news channel may be worth 20 Euro in France, but is more of an "yeah, all right, why not" buy for someone in Austria trying to freshen up his language skills.
    - tripzilch 9y ago
      Funny how "let the market decide the price" is suddenly a much less attractive option when it means making way less money. Are French newspapers also suddenly a lot cheaper when sold in Austria? Of course not. They're more expensive in fact, because of transport and the cost of stocking a relatively unpopular item. Now, these two costs don't matter for digital/streaming media. So imagine that they are negligible for French newspapers, too. Would they be sold in Austria for super-cheap, with just a slim margin on the price of paper they're printed on? I kind of expect the price to be roughly the same, actually. The only reason that digital/streaming media get to pretend to be "different" is because they started out with the technological means to enforce market segmentation before regulation got wind of it. And that ability is incredibly profitable, to the detriment of the consumer. Which is why we regulate it. And now they don't want to give back something they really didn't have any right to in the first place. Note that I'm not claiming either side of whether these streaming media should be the expensive local price everywhere, or the cheap everywhere-else price. Just that the fact that the market value of something differs extremely between regions, is an argument for regulation of market segmentation, not against.
pfisch 9y ago
Don't you think the most likely outcome of this is the far majority of older media titles will just no longer be available in the EU indefinitely? It will be unreasonably difficult and just not worth it to track down and negotiate with all the various the owners for each territory for most older titles.
- danmaz74 9y ago
  Why would that happen? I'm pretty sure that whoever the owner of those rights are, they want to make money out of them.
  - giobox 9y ago
    You'd think so, but the BBC found similar problems when launching their streaming services. Annoyingly I can't find the link, but IIRC the BBC originally looked into making everything it had ever made in its giant archives available to stream. Even for the content the BBC produced and owned internally, which is a huge amount, they determined it simply wasn't possible to offer the full BBC back catalog all the time on their service - tracking down the various rights holders, actors, and other parties to the content to renegotiate for streaming was an impossible undertaking. A real shame - a readily accessible public database of all of the BBC's content would have been incredible, especially when so much of it was paid for by UK tax payers. The last Labour government in 2010 was looking at options to legislate to absolve the BBC of these responsiblities, but sadly it didn't go anywhere. This is absolutely a problem that will need legal changes to fix for old content, realistically.
    - caf 9y ago
      The simplest fix might be a mandated license for streaming old content where the royalties go to a collection agency and can be claimed by the rightsholders when they finally show up.
      - Nition 9y ago
        Maybe limit the collection time as well, so e.g. Any funds that have been sitting without a valid claim for more than a year go back to the BBC.
sigzero 9y ago
No government should force that. It should be up to the company on where it's goods are sold etc.
- Thrillington 9y ago
  Sure, if your only goal is to maximize profit extraction and wealth consolidation.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  Corporations have rights, true. But consumers also have rights.
  - IanCal 9y ago
    For example of a small thing that's discussed by the EU with regards to this, if I get a netflix subscription here then go over the border I can no longer watch what I have even already downloaded. Netflix should not have to stop someone watching a show just because they went a bit further down the road.
- CamperBob2 9y ago
  If the government is going to act as hired muscle for the copyright industry, then it should have at least some room to dictate the terms.
- matt4077 9y ago
  The great thing about the law is that it can be whatever we collectively decide it to be. And considering that companies don't have any moral rights, you need to proof that affording them such power positively affects actual people.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
bcrescimanno 9y ago
Former Netflix employee here. I do hope the EU gets on top of Content Owners soon. In my time at Netflix, we often worked hard to negotiate global content deals; however, it's far more lucrative for the content owners to sell for each market individually. I suspect that the other players in this space feel the same way; all of them are held hostage by the content owners.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

azernik 9y ago

They're working on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Single_Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Single_Market Note that the issue is rulemaking, not enforcement. The Single Market is a statement of principle, not a legally-applicable regulation, and needs specific rules to be made to put it into effect in different markets.

bdhess 9y ago
I would also add that the original intent was to remove government-imposed barriers to trade between the members (elimination of duties, regulation, etc). Whereas the unavailability of certain content based on location is almost certainly the result of a contractual arrangement between content makers and distributors rather than a government-imposed limit.
- azernik 9y ago
  The scope of the Single Market is broader than that - it includes standardization of weights and measures, standardization of product names, etc. - rules that apply to private companies, and are meant to break down extra-legal obstacles to trade.
  - bdhess 9y ago
    > The scope of the Single Market is broader than that - it includes standardization of weights and measures, standardization of product names, etc Well historically individual states had their own regulations regarding weights/measures and product names, and that authority was transferred to the new market when it was created. These types of regulations ensure a level playing field between buyers and sellers, and are an important function of any regulated market. You know what you're getting when you buy a 750 mL bottle of Chateauneuf. It doesn't necessarily follow that the maker of the Chateauneuf ought to be required to distribute it in a particular geographic territory.
    - richrichardsson 9y ago
      > It doesn't necessarily follow that the maker of the Chateauneuf ought to be required to distribute it in a particular geographic territory. Exactly. There are some awesome products that I can't buy in the UK, because no-one imports and sells them, that are available in France etc., and vice versa. Of course I'm free to go and buy them myself and bring them back without duty (for the next couple of years at least, after that, on vera).
      - simonh 9y ago
        But this isnt about requiring Chateauneuf to do anything, its about restrictions on what people who buy Chateauneuf can do with their bottles, where they can take them and who they can sell them on to.
    - tremon 9y ago
      It doesn't necessarily follow that the maker of the Chateauneuf ought to be required to distribute it in a particular geographic territory. True, but the maker of Chateauneuf cannot prohibit a reseller from exporting its products to that territory either. That content-providers have been able to prohibit this, is only because of copyright. And since copyright is a government-granted monopoly, it does follow that the EU can use its monopoly grant to enforce that same single-market principle for digital content.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
- toyg 9y ago
  In some countries it is government-imposed, in the sense that national authorities exist in law, which will hoover up royalties before distributing them to creators and performers. This requires that any performance or distribution is recorded by (and paid to) such authority. At the moment, if an entity in the Italian market shows a French movie to Italian audiences, the Italian authority collects royalties before sending them to the registered owners of such rights; but what happens when a German entity shows the same film to Italian audiences? Does it pay Italian authorities or follow German rules? That's the sticky point from a legal point of view, which needs European legislation and cooperation from all involved parties (investors, producers, distributors, streamers etc) to be resolved. Since the industry benefits from market segmentation though, they are dragging their feet. For example, it's usually better to sell the same film to a different distributor in each country, rather than a single one serving all markets - 28 smaller paydays will often tally up to levels that one single Euro-wide agreement is unlikely to reach; and some films will do well only in certain countries, so might be penalized at EU level.
  - matt4077 9y ago
    I don't quite see how this is different from, for example, sales tax. Or, actually the status quo: if you're a Polish company organising a music festival in Italy you follow Italian law. That principle won't change just because it's a streaming service, for the obvious reason that anything else would lead to content distributers shopping around for the cheapest jurisdiction. Regarding the distributers' wish for market segmentation: That's a perfectly understandable reason, and it will become illegal rather soonish. Sure, you can chose you customers. But you won't be able to make their nationality part of the equation much longer. The public will profit rather obviously. Personally, I don't even care about any changes in pricing. Most annoying are companies segmenting the market along borders, and then never actually signing a local distributor. Or somehow only selling the translated movie etc. One caveat for practical reasons will be sports rights. It's just not possible to set a single price for, say, the British Premier League games that works everywhere: either it's but a fraction of today's prices, or nobody outside the UK would consider buying a subscription* * UK example for demonstration purposes only. Will not be implemented. Search for better examples underway.
WilliamDhalgren 9y ago
that's an optimistic way to frame the situation; there's heavy opposition from the content industry to limits to geoblocking, and unsurprisingly the industry seems to have support within the commission (Oettinger at least - perhaps the fact he now left the Digital Economy and Society position helps). I'm not confident at all they'll be able to completely ban geoblocking in one go. Hopeful they will at least poke some holes in it this round. Most parts of the single market needed a couple of revisions of a directive (quite a few years removed) before liberalizing a particular market fully..
- matt4077 9y ago
  > Oettinger at least - perhaps the fact he now left the Digital Economy and Society position helps). It certainly has lowered my blood pressure–he's now in a much more important position. But that means that people will actually stop him if he continues to embarrass himself in the way he previously did. There'll be exceptions for sports broadcasts, and maybe other content where there is a reason legitimising a difference in prices. For example: a french 24h news channel may be worth 20 Euro in France, but is more of an "yeah, all right, why not" buy for someone in Austria trying to freshen up his language skills.
  - tripzilch 9y ago
    Funny how "let the market decide the price" is suddenly a much less attractive option when it means making way less money. Are French newspapers also suddenly a lot cheaper when sold in Austria? Of course not. They're more expensive in fact, because of transport and the cost of stocking a relatively unpopular item. Now, these two costs don't matter for digital/streaming media. So imagine that they are negligible for French newspapers, too. Would they be sold in Austria for super-cheap, with just a slim margin on the price of paper they're printed on? I kind of expect the price to be roughly the same, actually. The only reason that digital/streaming media get to pretend to be "different" is because they started out with the technological means to enforce market segmentation before regulation got wind of it. And that ability is incredibly profitable, to the detriment of the consumer. Which is why we regulate it. And now they don't want to give back something they really didn't have any right to in the first place. Note that I'm not claiming either side of whether these streaming media should be the expensive local price everywhere, or the cheap everywhere-else price. Just that the fact that the market value of something differs extremely between regions, is an argument for regulation of market segmentation, not against.

pfisch 9y ago

Don't you think the most likely outcome of this is the far majority of older media titles will just no longer be available in the EU indefinitely? It will be unreasonably difficult and just not worth it to track down and negotiate with all the various the owners for each territory for most older titles.

danmaz74 9y ago
Why would that happen? I'm pretty sure that whoever the owner of those rights are, they want to make money out of them.
- giobox 9y ago
  You'd think so, but the BBC found similar problems when launching their streaming services. Annoyingly I can't find the link, but IIRC the BBC originally looked into making everything it had ever made in its giant archives available to stream. Even for the content the BBC produced and owned internally, which is a huge amount, they determined it simply wasn't possible to offer the full BBC back catalog all the time on their service - tracking down the various rights holders, actors, and other parties to the content to renegotiate for streaming was an impossible undertaking. A real shame - a readily accessible public database of all of the BBC's content would have been incredible, especially when so much of it was paid for by UK tax payers. The last Labour government in 2010 was looking at options to legislate to absolve the BBC of these responsiblities, but sadly it didn't go anywhere. This is absolutely a problem that will need legal changes to fix for old content, realistically.
  - caf 9y ago
    The simplest fix might be a mandated license for streaming old content where the royalties go to a collection agency and can be claimed by the rightsholders when they finally show up.
    - Nition 9y ago
      Maybe limit the collection time as well, so e.g. Any funds that have been sitting without a valid claim for more than a year go back to the BBC.

sigzero 9y ago

No government should force that. It should be up to the company on where it's goods are sold etc.

Thrillington 9y ago
Sure, if your only goal is to maximize profit extraction and wealth consolidation.
AnimalMuppet 9y ago
Corporations have rights, true. But consumers also have rights.
- IanCal 9y ago
  For example of a small thing that's discussed by the EU with regards to this, if I get a netflix subscription here then go over the border I can no longer watch what I have even already downloaded. Netflix should not have to stop someone watching a show just because they went a bit further down the road.
CamperBob2 9y ago
If the government is going to act as hired muscle for the copyright industry, then it should have at least some room to dictate the terms.
matt4077 9y ago
The great thing about the law is that it can be whatever we collectively decide it to be. And considering that companies don't have any moral rights, you need to proof that affording them such power positively affects actual people.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

bcrescimanno 9y ago

Former Netflix employee here. I do hope the EU gets on top of Content Owners soon. In my time at Netflix, we often worked hard to negotiate global content deals; however, it's far more lucrative for the content owners to sell for each market individually. I suspect that the other players in this space feel the same way; all of them are held hostage by the content owners.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]