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?
I'm not entirely fond of BBC programming and the licence fee model as a whole. I'd rather see it turn into a subscription service here at home too. That said, it's already funded and paid for so why not let others access it freely? Contribute some art and culture to the world. Unless they're actively marketing to a global audience, allowing free global access won't cost any more than allowing only domestic access†. The output is already paid for, I don't want to spite everyone else by saying "you can't have this".
I'd love to see more art be published as a public good [1], paid for by those who can and freely enjoyed by all alike.
And I say this as a licence fee payer and voter.
However, I'm not sure that legislation is the way to go. There's a fine line between the freedom to profit from your art and the freedom of all to enjoy it - I'd rather see a cultural shift where companies and artist who are well compensated are happy to let their art be freely enjoyed.
† I understand that for an internet-based distribution platform this isn't strictly true (bandwidth and server capacity). But if the will was there, I'm sure a balance could be struck involving liberal traditional syndication and rebroadcast rights, and syndicated CDN infrastructure.
The BBC makes a substantial proportion of their revenue, and therefore covers a large percentage of the cost of production, from international sales. This means that rather than it all being paid for and ready to give away you'd see at least 50% budget cuts for stuff like Doctor Who and quite a lot things which are multi-country collaborations between the BBC and other broadcasters would never see the light of day at all.
The Wikipedia article you quote states that as the possible earn-out over a 15 year period rather than the 5 year period you suggest. Overall collection costs as quoted in those documents are roughly 2.7%, which isn't wildly off what you might pay for credit card processing fees. I'm no great fan of the license fee myself (although I haven't heard of a compelling alternative), but cost of collection isn't a strong argument against it.
You're completely right - I misread that period. Thanks for pointing that out. I'll leave my original comment so your correction still makes sense.
I do, however, think that a minimum of £73.3m per year (£1.1bn / 15yrs) is a disproportionately large figure to pay for license fee enforcement. I absolutely think that the high cost of managing the license fee infrastructure is a good argument against the model, and the removal of those overheads (and others) may offset a some of the lost revenue.
A change in licensing model and overall culture (which I do understand has been attempted several times in the recent past) might result in a more universally appealing BBC. I struggle to find BBC programming very compelling, particularly when compared with other domestic and international broadcasters. They always feel... out of touch.
Ideally, "willing to". I'd like to see a cultural shift where everyone sees the value of broadcast media and news, and those who have the means feel it's their responsibility to contribute in order to further the development and sharing of knowledge and culture.
I hate to compare it to open source software (because I don't think we've really settled on an ideal and universally appealing method of funding); but currently depending on the license, open source software is generally freely enjoyable by all and funded by those individuals and corporations who can and wish to do so.
Humble Bundle is another great example. Everyone pays - those with little (money or will to pay) can pay £0.01, those with more can and do pay much more, effectively becoming patrons.
Edit: Humble Bundle is another great example (just to highlight that while not open source, their funding model is innovative and objectively quite successful).
> Why should a service, that is advert free and wholly paid for by the UK licence payers, be free to people elsewhere?
Why should libraries, wholly paid for by local citizens, not demand citizen-units' papers to ensure they are local before allowing them to partake of all that juicy, non-rivalrous knowledge?
Because they are in the business of providing knowledge, not being gate keepers. (They have to gate-keep to some extent, of course, but that is more about keeping the collection healthy.)
Mike Masnik (Techdirt), I think, was the first to make the case that people's understanding of economics seems to break down when encountering zero-cost. It is a real problem.
The BBS example reflects a time when a island nation-state was looking for a way to fund public TV. The non-rivalrous nature of airwave reception led them to a (much mocked and hated, but functional) taxation system.
Now that "broadcast" generally means "internet", for that model to work, artificial scarcity must be employed, denying people benefits that could be provided at zero marginal cost to protect a funding mechanism that only makes sense in hindsight.
Fixing the mechanism to function in a changed world would seem to make more sense to me. But then I'm not British, a politician or dependent on an out of date system for my dinner, so what do I know.
Wait-- not that I necessarily disagree with your entire point, but I have moved several times in my life and every single U.S. library system I have been part of (Houston, Boston, etc) has required some form of confirmation that I live in their taxation/service region. Some of them are nicer--we'll mail you a postcard to confirm you get mail!--but the verification is there.
So I think there is some warrant to restricting access to those who have contributed.
I think it has to do with cost. Most websites are not geo-blocked. It's primarily video that gets blocked.
In the future I imagine geo-blocking will be less common as (1) the cost of video-capable CDNs goes down, and (2) the use of geo-targeted ads go up.
Ultimately it's up to the content provider to decide how to share their content. Those who want their messages to be seen will allow them to be viewed by everyone for whom the provider can do so in a cost-efficient manner.
That example doesn't really work - the BBC enforces geo-restrictions because it sells its content internationally, to those who do not pay the license fee. There isn't really a library equivalent of that.
You could call Inter Library Loans a version of this, but it's free. If my library doesn't have a piece of media, it is very possible that I could get that piece of media from another library across the country. I might pay postage, but depending on the library, it might still be free. Like the non-brit who has not paid the licensing fee, I paid no taxes to the other library, but in this case I can still take advantage of that resource. This sort-of already happens with BBC and US Public Broadcasting, but I don't think BBC probably licenses anything back from WABE here.
But the library that you re borrowing from probably also borrows books from your library. So you have "paid" by sharing the books that your taxes have paid for with that library.
More to the point, as a Brit living in the USA, I'd be more than happy to pay my license fee from here and keep watching. Right now I "steal" it, which makes me feel bad every time I fire up the VPN. BBC: I will pay you. Others will pay you. This will lower the license fee back home.
> I will pay you. Others will pay you. This will lower the license fee back home.
As I understand it, this isn’t necessarily the case. I understand that the BBC actually investigated making iPlayer available in the US previously. The outcome was that cable networks told them they’d drop BBC America if it was to go ahead. For most networks in the US, BBCA sits in the middle tier - not a premium channel (eg HBO), but not in the basic package. It’s used as bait/value-add to provide incentive for customers to upgrade from the basic package. So for the networks, having the same content available online lowers its value.
This is the basic crunch when it comes to geo-free online streaming vs traditional cable networks. We (customers) want both models available to us, but the two are in direct opposition. And in this case, it’d appear the traditional model is still winning, since BBC International decided that preserving BBCA’s income was more important.
We tend to paint it as rather protectionist, but in most cases, the content-providers do have the option of walking. That they don’t want to, tells us that the existing model is still the more profitable. There’s not much we can do to fight it until this changes.
Excuse the stupid question, but why is BBC still dependent on cross-selling to other cable networks and therefore to bow to their strategic interests? Why couldn't BBC market directly to ent-users as an internet streaming service?
I've never been to any part of the UK, and I'd gladly pay BBC similar to Netflix or Hulu rates for access without a VPN. I just like following British shows, and it's very difficult and expensive to get them through other channels (with long delays, for some reason).
In simple terms, also a Brit living abroad, I agree. But I think the problem is Entertainment Industry layers of licensing. I believe the BBC pays actors, images and incidental music by industry association (eg BMI), license which may not be global, but only for UK territories. Geo-blocking is more of a problem of super complex royalties and intellectual property management, not simply they don't want to share. Compare with sports events which are licensed by territory for no practical reason except negotiating rights, the successful bidding media outlet is often required by the producer to geo-block.
They don't even do that here. You are only forced to pay the fee by law if you have a device that you use to watch TV as its aired (along with some other rules). The way this is enforced is by someone who goes round to each house and verifies you have a license. They can't force their way in. There isn't a way, as far as I know, where they can just turn your TV access off, unlike cable companies can.
A pass for international use would be a bit odd without doing something like that here at home first.
This would be actually simple. Encrypt the broadcast and require CAM for decoding. Each card has a number and while there is a payment coming for the card, the card is active.
So next time the broadcast is changing and requires updated tuners (i.e. DVB-T2 and HEVC with 4K), just require one with CI.
Everyone is happy - those, who want TV get TV, those who don't, do not have to pay.
As a paying member, why can't other people around the world experience the shows I've funded. It doesn't cost anything to release a torrent and I'm happy to spread our culture.
Since the BBC create a large amount of revenue from licensing the shows out. If it was distributed free then either our license fee would have to go up or they'd have to drop the quality of the content with the reduced funding.
If the organization (and it's paying members, depending on the governance model) could come to that decision, that'd be great, but that's certainly not the default for most organizations that produce such high-value content (I personally think the BBC is one of the best news outfits in the world).
Also, some paying members might prefer to charge those who don't directly contribute to offset the cost of their own contributions.
Except that charging more people doesn't offset; the goal will never be to offset, it will be to generate the greatest possible revenue. Even non-profit corporations have executives who personally benefit from salaries and the power to distribute them.
We're talking specifically about the BBC (and perhaps Channel 4) here, not the entire British television industry. Even though the BBC have a few internationally successful hit shows, the vast majority of Europeans simply don't speak English well enough to be able enjoy these programmes without some sort of localisation so the audience of these streams would be rather limited in practice.
I think you're overestimating this. German-speakers, for example, are proficient in English above the EU average but culturally used to watching exclusively dubbed content (widely available because their market is big enough to make it profitable), so mainstream audiences surely won't suddenly switch to consuming English content. I would wager that the Nordic countries are probably the only where both high proficiency and high comfort with untranslated content are close to being mainstream.
What exactly are you arguing though? That there's "only" 25% english speakers and that they should still be forbidden from being able to BUY english content because not all their countrymen can speak it?!
Ah no, I was arguing that "this would destroy our licensing/localization business" arguments are overblown. It would get rid of discrimination and barriers to the single market and also generate some extra cross-border income, but it would not make established business models unworkable overnight.
Argument #1 has been made well by several sibling comments: I would argue that the TV license fee is not payment for access to BBC content, but a funding mechanism to enable the creation of high-quality public value content which, once successfully financed, should be disseminated as widely as possible.
Argument #2: Estonians pay Estonian TV license fees, Austrians Austrian fees. In a common market and a political union, why do we block eachothers' public-value, publicy funded content from eachother?
Edit: I mentioned the BBC because that was the example given.
I understand that you'd rather not pound on a singular example. But I think the BBC is a prime example. For the last Olympics I wanted BBC coverage, if only because in the U. S. you can...not...get coverage unless you have cable. One can either VPN or do what I did and setup a Linode in London for ssh tunneling. Knowing how the BBC is funded, I wanted to pay my fair share. At the time, unless one lives in the U. K., there is no way to do that. I put a fair effort into trying to find something to tell me how, too, not just "click...didn't find anything, time to enjoy free TV!". Sell me a three week license for $50, say "screw it, Olympics for everyone for three weeks!", something. Or leave money on the table while I give it to Linode.
To branch from the singular example, it annoys me to know end when I want to watch someone's content and they will not take my money. Fine, I can pirate in good conciseness, but I just to click, click, enter CC #, start watching, not go track down a torrent or find out if Linode has a data center in that country, et. al. The Oatmeal has a comic on this very topic that should hang in every content exec's office.
The olympics isn't just the bbc's content though. It's licensed to broadcasters based in region. The bbc couldn't have sold you a three week viewing license if it wanted to. There is no way they would have permission to do so.
In most cases the broadcaster isn't the content owner. They have a license for their region and nowhere else.
You're just the messenger so this is in no way directed at you, and I'm pretty sure you're right without any further sources, but I don't care. That's not my problem to solve, as (for this specific example) I already solved it. But while those responsible squabble over rights, and who's got permission to do what with which content, I'm over here giving money to people that have nothing to do with the production of the Olympics.
It's important to understand the "why" of a situation so as to propose reasonable solutions, otherwise one just pulls stuff out of their ass that'll never fly ("all content should just be free", or whatever). But the "well, it's complicated excuse" is just weak. Try that the next time your bug comes up in triage. Go refactor, make it less complicated, get your ass back out there and fix the bug. All the understanding of "why" in the content situation tells me is, "man, you guys are so screwed", because too many entrenched rent-seeking interests don't want to hear my solutions.
No matter, as I said I've solved the problem for me (including just watching less TV). But that isn't going to make the McLaren payments for Warner execs.
Rightholders usually don't allow services to let you pay for it if you're from another country.
At least implicitly, their estimation is that accepting your money would damage their ability to exclusively license content 28 times in the EU, and that eroding that system would do more harm to the bottom line than the extra money they might make.
In practice, the vast majority of content is of course not successfully licensed 28 times, so they end up turning away/not even aiming for the majority of their potential customers for the majority of their works.
Whether the current model is really best for rightholders' (maybe just publishers') bottom lines is up for debate -- in their calculation, they are probably biased towards prolonging the established business models that come from the times of terrestrial TV broadcasting/physical media sales.
What is clear, from an EU point of view, is that the geoblocking that is required to enforce this model artificially limits the audience of a lot of European cultural products, forces people to seek out copyright-infringing channels, reinforces digital borders between EU member states, harms lingustic minorities etc -- and is just in fundamental conflict with both the idea of the common EU market and the internet as a global medium.
Right, so if legislators and voters feel that the current use of the law-granted rights results in undesirable results, they can alter the conditions so that the publishers are not allowed to region-lock or do exclusive licencing limited to a particular part of the EU.
Just as they do with many other industries to facilitate the goal of a single EU market.
Right. Just to add for example HBO's content is way cheaper in India than US itself because they would have to figure what local population can afford there.
I'm sure the BBC would love to be able to sell subscriptions around the world. The trouble is its only worth doing that if they can make more money from it than they can from licensing their content to local broadcasters. They're probably not there now, but even if they were, there are years of deals in place everywhere.
> Why should a service, that is advert free and wholly paid for by the UK licence payers, be free to people elsewhere?
Free would be great, but for the BBC I would settle for being able to pay a fair fee for access.
On the whole I dislike the way every company has their own streaming service these days but BBC pretty consistently produces good quality content and they don't focus exclusively on entertainment, their educational shows are actually what I prefer.
I'm no expert but I can think of a couple ideas.
- stop doing exclusive agreements for a region
- explicitly exclude streaming from agreemnets that do region locking
This is actually how the internet work, or at least worked, until the olde guard discovered that it could be used for digital distribution.
Here they had the most perfect distribution mechanism on earth. A global market at their hands, at zero cost, without the need for middle-men.
So what did they do? Did they see the potential this gave them? No, because it didn't match their existing broadcasting licence contracts.
Nope. They did the only thing natural: Instead of changing the contracts, they're trying to change the internet.
Invest everything they could into systems which makes digital distribution painful, less functional, and intentionally delivering all content in incompatible formats not playable by most players and devices (DRMed), and ensure that nobody anywhere any benefits from the new technology, except them.
Why do we even allow them to do this?
If this is how the future is going to work, I might start longing for the 80s again.
I can't wait for these dinosaurs to die. They're ruining this great internet we have here, one bit at a time.
Here they had the most perfect distribution mechanism on earth. A global market at their hands, at zero cost, without the need for middle-men.
This is the part that mystifies me: sacrifice sales to preserve an old model. Oh, I know that the guilty parties don't think they're sacrificing sales because licensing models, blah, blah, blah. And maybe I need to sit down, do the math, and find out they're right. But it'll take some convincing for me to believe that between these two choices:
1. Hey, 7 billion people on the planet, if you have internet access and $5, you can watch this.
2. Hey, Brits, wanna watch a cool show? Tune in tomorrow. 'mericuns? No, we won't be taking your money right now. But we'll take it next year. When? Oh, we don't know, we have some deals to cut first. Okay, we'll take your money now. What? You found something else to occupy your viewing time in those six month? What's that, Costa Rica? No, I don't even see you on the list. Maybe next year.
...#2 makes the most money. While taking little interest in the whole business, were I to guess it's due to fifedoms and entrenched interests. That Costa Rican distributor wants his cut, too.
Distributor: You want to bypass me and stream your movies to my country? Help yourself but I won't show your movies in theaters and nobody else will do.
Major: sees a sure immediate loss and a possible future gain. The CEO doesn't take risks and keeps getting the money.
However this leaves the door open for new companies with original content that can't be blackmailed by local distributors. Example: Netflix.
Eventually the majors will bypass distributors when theaters won't be so important anymore. It's going to take time.
> This is the part that mystifies me: sacrifice sales to preserve an old model.
The only one I’m familiar with is BBC America in the US. In this case, they’re “sacrificing sales” so preserve the more profitable model. It’s okay to sacrifice sales if those sales are going to cause you more losses than they’re worth (in this case, networks threatening to drop BBCA)
I think what is particularly frustrating about this model is that the locking applies to content even when you've already paid for access. I am an American expat living in Russia currently, and one of my larger regrets is that I cannot watch the content I legally have access to under Amazon Prime because of geo-locking. Prime's original content is not geo-locked in the slightest, but for any other show, movie, music, or book which I have already paid for access to, I am unable to view it simply because I'm in the wrong IP block.
edit: strangely though, as I just noticed on my FireHD, content I downloaded to the device using PrimeVideo in the US is viewable; it's simply streaming Prime content which is forbidden. The technical difference between a copy sitting in a browser cache that was downloaded in Russia and a copy sitting in the temp storage for the FireHD video player that was downloaded in the US is so insignificant it's baffling that one is allowed and the other isn't. Ultimately, both methods (would) accomplish the same goal; watching a licensed show from Prime in the Russian Federation.
I understand, to a degree, that the reason is a complex web of licensing and distributor agreements. But I feel like these agreements have a very tenuous relationship to streaming content as it differs significantly from the purpose of the original agreements, which was to allow local distributors to profit on the licensed content with localized versions; but that was for an entirely different medium. It's an incredibly weird scenario to me because an agreement over physical media from probably a decade or two ago is preventing me from viewing digital media which wasn't even an option at the time of the original agreements.
There's no extra cost to Amazon to let me watch my stupid shows in St. Petersburg, and as I'm not interested in DVDs/Bluray anyways, it's not as if access to said streams is costing any distributors anything; the "potential sale" was already missed the moment that I got access to the streaming service in the US, both for US distributors and for any foreign distributor.
Individual game companies seem to be able to handle regional distribution even when the economies vary enough to encourage regional pricing; I'm not sure why non-interactive media thinks it cannot do this, or that it would somehow be bad. But it's particularly frustrating that these services, once purchased, work in some places on the planet, but not others, and the only reason is a bunch of agreements made well before the services even existed.
I hate geoblocking, but looking trough the site I only felt like facepalm. It's the same as poverty sucks so let's give 1000$ a month to everybody and somehow where the money will come from will be figured out by someone.
Universal minimum income is a lot nuanced then that.
It's meant to replace a lot of service like food stamps and housing vouchers and let the poor pick what they spend their money on and avoid bureaucracy. It's also meant to prevent the "welfare trap", an over-exaggerated but real problem, where getting a job and earning money can cost you more in benefits then you gain from the job.
There's been interesting studies lately on the effects of direct cash charity and a lot of study showing the effects of the earned income tax credit, 2 things which have strong similarities to universal income.
1. Pass EU law that applies the country of origin principle as seen in the Cable and Satellite Directive to online "broadcasts" as well, establishing legal grounds for services to make passive (non-advertised) sales to customers from countries they have not acquired distribution rights for.
2. The European Commission clarifies that contractual clauses requiring inner-EU geoblocking are null because they do not constitute justified exceptions from the anti-discrimination/antitrust provisions Article 20 of the Services Directive and/or Article 101 TFEU.
3. Parliament & Council pass the Portability Regulation before them today without adding undue restrictions, enabling European to take their paid content subscriptions with them across borders for temporary stays.
The result of these 3 easily doable actions would be to massively reduce geoblocking within the EU by removing the most common obligations to geoblock: Contractual clauses by rightholders and legal uncertainty/risk that causes overblocking/geoblocking-by-default.
Rightholders could continue to bind distributors/services to the release window system (cinemas first, then DVD, then VoD), to restrict which countries they may actively target/advertise to, and of course retain full autonomy over dubbing/subtitling and other localization.
Services could continue to geoblock to comply with other local laws (e.g. gambling, child protection).
What do the UK licence payers win by the current situation?
Why would they loose if people in other contries could see it?
That is the point of post-scarcity economics...
The knowledge and information of the BBC could impact millions instead of billions, and the current payers wouldn't miss a thing.
I guess that I somebody wants to see show X, then it will see show X. That can either be done via the provider's website (BBC/YT), via DVD, or via illegal download.
Now, if a british expat is living in Spain and wants to watch the show, they will go on BBC's youtube channel. Video not available ? Well then, go to TPB or any streaming website. Better earn a bit than nothing (eg: GoT).
You only see one end of the problem: if all the countries "open their contents", well then everybody pays for everybody.
> Is it being proposed that all copyrighted material be subjected to compulsory universal licensing?
Personally, I think this would be a far better copyright reform than any we've gotten in the last hundred years. Compulsory licensing for music, which is largely in effect for public performance and broadcast performance (in North America at least), enables all sorts of great things that just aren't possible in the modern copyright environment.
I can think of far worse things in the world for owners of copyrighted works who want to sell that work than for them to have to do so in a fair market.
There is certainly an argument to be made for the UK to just let internationals access the BBC content for free, since, one, they get significantly less per view outside of the UK for it (relative to the taxes per Brit that funds the BBC) and two, BBC content can drive demand for the rest of the British entertainment sector globally. There are plenty of films and third party studios operating in the UK, and they would probably appreciate more broad adoption of British media around the world.
> There are plenty of films and third party studios operating in the UK, and they would probably appreciate more broad adoption of British media around the world.
On the other hand, they might very well see the BBC providing free access to iPlayer etc to the world as competition within a niche market.
What is provided by the BBC and provided by BBC Worldwide is entirely different.
Aside, it also depends on what you mean by geoblocking. Should I, who pays for the BBC each month, suddenly lose access because I'm away in France for business?
Or more generally, if people are willing to pay the licence fee, why should it matter where they live? Nobody says it has to be free for everyone outside the UK, but could people outside the UK not pay exactly the same and expect to get the same back?
The issue is that the BBC already sold the rights to those other countries. In most cases, it can force the local rights-owners (who paid good money to BBC) to hand them back.
An issue is that there is no option to overcome the limit, by paying for example.
But still, even the BBC argument is weak. I can watch many free streams, which don't even have ads (because they don't have local advertising inventory), made by commercial entities (e.g. sky news, bloomberg) or state-supported (France24). BBC is just pandering to its "proud supporters". The content is already produced. Britons should be proud to show it to the world.
It is (usually) available through licensing. And there's a major cost (deal, legal, infrastructure) to making content available in a new country. Who should cover that cost if the demand is too low?
I was only correcting the parent regarding the BBC. I don't have enough knowledge about the industry to comment on the surrounding costs, but I imagine that there's a lot of content where it would be worth it.
In order to be fair to people elsewhere, it need not be free. You simply need people elsewhere to pay the same license that the people in the UK do. Currently it's not at all possible to pay the license fee and watch from outside the UK, and this is where the discrimination lies.
But, then again, if I pay a license fee in France, why shouldn't I be able to watch licensed content in the UK? This works for retirement schemes. If I live in the US and pay into Social Security, then after 20 years move to the UK and pay into their pension scheme, subsequently retire there, I will be credited for paying into Social Security despite being paid out by National Insurance.
I don't think it makes sense to force business plans on companies.
And yet we've done it multiple times in the US. We routinely encounter situations in the media industry where a new medium is hated/feared by the entrenched players who try to use refusal to license content as a way to kill the new medium before it takes off. Up until very recently, the standard solution to this, in order to not have artifically-granted monopolies on content stifle technological innovation, was for Congress to impose mandatory licensing schemes on the copyright holders.
That's how cable TV originally got off the ground, for example; over-the-air broadcast networks didn't want to license their content to cable, but Congress imposed mandatory licensing on them. Result: brand-new multi-billion-dollar industry that kept those networks alive a while longer.
To 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.
Sure, 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.
Rather, when dealing with post-scarcity goods, the seller has two, and only two options: Monetize the people that are getting that content, or spend money and resource playing pirate whackamole.
One of these two things makes money.
We're halfway through the 2010s, if a random web developer can paywall content and take money for access in hours, then the BBC can manage. I want to give them money. They won't let me.
Their loss. My conscience is clear when I watch Countdown through a UK proxy.
That implies a rational business. Rationally, new content ends up on the internet, unencrypted, within minutes of air, and all the whackamole in the world doesn't change that.
All the anti-piracy methods practiced by major content providers is inherently irrational.
If you visit the UK and watch in a hotel then the hotel paid for it. If you're watching on iPlayer then you'll have clicked-through a warning saying you need a licence to watch.
>If you're watching on iPlayer then you'll have clicked-through a warning saying you need a licence to watch. //
In the UK you can freely watch iPlayer content as long as it's not currently being broadcast [roughly speaking, it's more nuanced than that]. The laws surrounding license fees refer to broadcasts, on-demand is not broadcast in those terms.
I 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.
The 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.
> 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?
You 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?
Please 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.
This. The answer to geoblocking is to just pirate the content if its unavailable to you. Don't whine that international corporations cannot profit off you. If you are somewhere they decide not to support paying them, you were never a part of the decision to make the content for profit in the first place.
They have economic pressure on them right now to broadly accept payments from as many places online as possible, because its effectively free money. We don't need legislation when the market is already set up to correct for the behavior.
They have economic pressure on them right now to broadly accept payments from as many places online as possible, because its effectively free money. We don't need legislation when the market is already set up to correct for the behaviour.
I don't think that's actually the case.
I'd argue that market segmentation can allow larger companies to extract more money from the market through agreeing territorial exclusivity with distributors. In other words, they can extract more money by restricting services. It's not always that content isn't available, but that the market is unfairly segmented. See the current hoo-ha over pay TV services, for example (http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-14-15_en.htm)
But aside from that, it offers the opportunity to fix a broken part of the market – content providers want to restrict territory, but I'll be distributors don't! Don't you think that Netflix would much rather have the same catalogue throughout the EU? It's not them who are preventing it, and the same problem is going to challenge any innovative businesses involved in digital content in the future.
> But aside from that, it offers the opportunity to fix a broken part of the market – content providers want to restrict territory, but I'll be distributors don't!
Are you sure about that? Netflix built its business around contracts with content creators. I doubt Netflix would support this new law. This law would not require content creators to make content available on Netflix.
My guess is, if such a law were passed, then Netflix would either (a) pull out of the EU or (b) restrict available content even further. And that's why you may not see support for such a bill. Legislators will hear that message from both Netflix and Hollywood. Your governments may either quietly ignore this campaign, or if it gets big enough, make some attempt to share the reasoning with the public. If you did manage to elect someone who could pass this law, I'll bet you find it hurts the available content more than it helps.
There's still plenty of room in the world for a Netflix competitor, particularly, locally based ones. Ironically, this law would hurt such startups more than it would help them. The fact is, content providers have good reason to limit consumption to certain mediums and areas.
Making content costs money, just like anything else. Content creators have a right to choose where and how to do business, just like any other company. Content creators lose money in countries with insufficient copyright controls. My guess is every country in the EU does not have the same copyright controls, and this is a major sticking point for content creators. And, in many cases, the content may not be findable via torrents etc. It does not hurt content creators to withhold certain content.
People made up money. Nobody really owns information or physical objects. Some people think all information should be free because it happens to be easier to acquire information than objects. Yet these same people will freely admit that authors and programmers deserve to be paid. It takes as much energy as physical labor. You need food, shelter and security to do it. One could argue that money is the problem, though I'd point out that moneyless societies have their own downsides, and historically, people don't want to be forced into them. Poor people are not chomping at the bit to move into communist societies, nor is any such society welcoming the world's poor with open arms. The few times that has happened successfully, it's been a call to arms, and the success is brief. Deng Xiaoping and Gorbachev's reforms made clear what works, which, love it or hate it, is some form of capitalism. It allows us to compete without killing each other.
I have to disagree with some of these principles. The EU is in many ways primarily about free trade - and one of the tools used to make that effective is robust regulation. It's a very capitalist organisation, but with the belief that markets are most effective when subject to regulation!
I don't think for a second we will see streaming providers pull out of the EU. They want market access to sell their products, ultimately, and regulation isn't going to change that.
Or you know, those "stupid" laws that let you live anywhere in EU, study anywhere in EU, work anywhere in EU and buy things anywhere in EU and carry them anywhere else in EU.
The utter stupidity of the fact, that you can drive 20km over Austrian/German border, buy a DVD, then drive back (which EU demands to be allowed) and then be denied streaming that exact same content is staggering.
> Or you know, those "stupid" laws that let you live anywhere in EU, study anywhere in EU, work anywhere in EU and buy things anywhere in EU and carry them anywhere else in EU.
How are those related to the internet? I did wrote "laws in regard to the internet" ....
You also did say "The EU should stop producing any laws at all". As a european benefiting every day from fantastic laws (including internet laws, by the way - privacy matters), I entirely disagree and I doubt I'm the only one.
It 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".
I 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.
That 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.
What about the data roaming costs laws? Well, the EU is a common market, it's appropriate that it expands in that respect. The VAT law was ill-thought, it should have gone to the opposite direction to make a seamless VAT area. As for the cookie law , i can only attribute it to senility.
Europe's startup lobby AlliedForStartups supports the demand to end geoblocking.
It is in fact the business practice of geoblocking and the legal framework of 28 different copyright territories & laws that:
* Most serves the big players distributing the most popular content, who are able to cut 28 licensing deals. For non-blockbuster productions, it mostly results in turning away customers/audiences.
* Keeps European VoD startups small. What's the only VoD service available in all EU countries? Netflix. Only 5% of VoD services you can subscribe to in the UK are from other EU countries -- 95% are either national (= forever small) or from overseas. We are artificially making it harder for EU startups to compete internationally.
Plus: It is the EU's stated mission to remove barriers to a common market and to eliminate discrimination of Europeans in Europe by country of origin. Curtailing geoblocking advances both.
Action on geoblocking is not arbitrary burdensome regulation. It's exactly fulfilling the purpose of the EU, it would be popular among the public -- and it would enable/help startups.
What if a startup wants to focus on serving video to a local community, rather than making it available to the world, which would cost the startup more bandwidth?
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.
If you are offering digital goods, then isn't that actually a reasonable requirement? Obviously if you're offering physical goods or services, there are legitimate barriers to distributing them. But wouldn't it be awesome if membership of the single market meant you were entitled to purchase digital goods from anywhere in it, without anyone artificially preventing you from doing so?
All those EU laws usually just help the big multinational companies to keep startups out of the market.*
That doesn't seem true. What's more likely – that a large American company can negotiate the required 20-some licenses required to stream content, or that a startup can do it?
The EU should stop producing any laws at all and concentrate on harmonising the endless supply of inconsistent laws in their member states.
That's really the main goal of a lot of EU directives – harmonisation across the single market.
I 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.
Geoblocking 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.
Geoblocking 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.
The 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.
American 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.
I 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."
Being 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".
American companies sign agreements with other American companies – that's fine. But when they want to sell into the EU, then it's fair for them to obey the law in EU states. One of the primary goals of the EU/EEA is to serve as a single market – and the entire practice of 'geoblocking' runs counter to this. Offering content to consumers in one EU state and not another segments the single market in a way that I'm surprised hasn't already been dealt with!
Your shoe market analogy isn't quite apt – we're not discussing whether or not companies have to be forced to offer content to the EU, but whether they are permitted to segment the market when they do sell to the EU.
Every EU company does not currently have to sell their products in every EU country. Neither does every American entertainment company.
The proposals, so far as I can tell, advocate a change in EU legislation such that digital goods cannot be sold to some EU countries and not others, or that EU consumers cannot be prevented from purchasing goods offered in another member state. Any such legislation will almost certainly apply to both EU and international companies. This is an idea that is very in-line with the single market goals of the EU, and I'm surprised that you seem to think otherwise.
Shipping is a different issue, but yes, every european company has to serve all european customers. If you have a shoe shop, you're not mandated to open a branch everywhere but if a foreigner from different EU country comes to buy then it would be illegal to decline them based on their citizenship, country of residence or country of their creditcard - in the exact same manner as currently online services are currently declining to serve customers based on their estimated location or nationality.
In a similar manner, if you're a manufacturer and want to sell shoes a wholesaler in e.g. Germany, then you're not obligated to sell them in other countries but you are prohibited from mandating that they must be sold only in Germany - the wholesaler and their customers are free to re-distribute them in neighbouring Austria even if you don't want them to.
True, but it is important to clarify that nobody right now is proposing to force companies to ship to other EU member states if they don't want to -- making the elimination of website blocking and the obligation to accept e.g. all EU credit cards/billing addresses that is on the agenda a lot less consequential in practice.
There are plans to work on shipping as well though. Right now the prizes can vary widely in the EU and people want to harmonize that. Once you have that part figured out, it won't take long until companies are going to be forced to ship to everywhere within the EU.
This isn't about forcing them to sell to Europe. It's about forcing them, if they want to sell to the Europe, to sell to the whole of the EU as a single market, because that's what it's supposed to be.
How would Americans react if some major company would sell goods or services in USA, but refuse service to, say, all residents of Texas - simply request your ID (or address on your creditcard) before sale and decline if you come from a state they don't like?
I get that you have very different attitude on regulations of commerce, but really, what would (in your opinion) be the American people reaction to that?
> what would (in your opinion) be the American people reaction to that?
Probably pretty negative. Is copyright enforced in equal ways across the EU?
I imagine content creators are interested in copyright laws being applied equally across regions. That includes things like subpoenas to ISPs and requests for taking down content that's illegally copied.
Is all that equally possible across the EU? My guess is it isn't. In the US, copyright is enforced the same across all states.
The problem is that for physical goods, if a shoe companies decides to only sell in America and not Europe, someone else could buy it America and ship it over to Europe to resell it, if there is demand for it. For intellectual propriety this option would likely be illegal.
A better analogy is this: If an American company decided to sell shoes in one European country but then tried to prevent people from reselling their shoes in another country they would actually be breaking the law.
This is exactly the same problem as the taxi medallions, there used to be a good reason for it, but now it blocks technological advances:
Technically, today one company can serve anybody in the world. This used not to be true and content creators had to deal with local distributors (cinemas, TV cable companies, etc...), and those local distributors were happy to pay a premium to get local monopoly.
Now newer better companies with better (awsome) models cannot serve content because of those old monopolies. Local distributors have no incentive to improve their service, and sure don't. Companies are going to need to ignore those "legal monopolies", and somehow operate illegally, in order to disturb the market and force everybody to move forward.
Recently 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.
Although 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.
I agree. I run an online business ONLY for users in the United States and there are laws in the US regulating my various user types and their activities.
I geoblock certain countries because, while not foolproof, it helps prevent scammers doing real harm (financial and emotional) by preying on my users and it's my responsibility to do as much as I can to protect my users and the reputation of my business.
I support the notion to end geoblocking in theory but the reality is that many countries do NOTHING to ensure a safe internet and their citizens take advantage of this with online fraud, scams, spamming, etc.
This 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.
Why 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.
It'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.
One 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.
US 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.
Wait.. 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.
The 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.
This 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)
Android 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)
There 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.
There 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.
I 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
While 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"...
I 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?
Unfortunately 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.
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?