Slashdot Mirror
Netflix Geoblocking Loosened Under New EU Law (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: "The European Parliament is now finalizing legislation which will allow EU residents to access their paid subscriptions for online media -- such as video streaming, games and music -- while visiting other EU countries," reports The Stack. Under the new rules, companies will not be able to arbitrarily block subscribers from accessing the content catalog of their home countries while visiting other parts of the European Union, with country of origin to be established by various possible methods besides IP address, including payment details, public tax information and 'checks on electronic identification'. The issue was brought to a head last year when Netflix began blocking the known IPs of VPN providers, often used by subscribers to access the catalogs of their home countries while travelling.
its funny how some of these companies attack trump but then go around geolocking all their shit, they arent cool with globalism depending on how affects their money
they are fine with the cheap worker from fuckistan lowering my salary but if i use their online store to buy some digital shit in the fuckistan currency because its better for me, then i get banned
thats why facebook, microsoft, amazon... can talk all they want, it wont matter, once you redpill enough people reality shows its ugly head: they are scum, simple as that
all globalism is is a way to make money for big companies, and everyone supporting it is human feces
I guess that's one way to put it. I'd say most people use the VPNs to access content blocked in their home country, and it sounds like this order actually harms that since your country remains the same regardless of your physical location(or your VPNs physical location).
The EU rules they are officially members of DVD Regions 1 through 5, but not 6.
There's no place like
As I said before, the streaming services like Netflix would like nothing more than to offer a single streaming catalog for the entire world. It would drastically simplify their operations. All these stories make it seem like they're the culprits, when they're not. They're forced to do this silly geo-blocking by the music and movie studios, who use it as a way to eek out a little more profit via a graduated rollout schedule - movie first shows up in theaters, then via pay per view, then for sale on blu-ray, then on subscription services, then syndicated on TV. Each earlier step gives them a little more revenue per viewer than the later steps.
The "correct" solution to this is for these studios to get their butts in gear and work at synchronizing these rollouts throughout the entire world. But because they have a monopoly on their shows, there is no competition, so there is no pressure for them to work at synchronizing. So they've been lazy and have been relying on the crutch of geo-blocking to prevent certain countries from getting access to movies and shows which have been out for months in other countries. Since the problem stems from a government-granted monopoly (copyright), the correct solution is for government to step in and prohibit use of the geo-blocking crutch.
Because EU lacks the ability to ban geoblocking when both company and customer are both outside EU. While it would be reasonable to allow say US citizens to connect to Netflix in Canada, both the US and Canada are outside of EU, hence allowed to ignore whatever they come with in Brussels.
Netflix does business in the EU; However, therefore, they must Adhere to ALL EU laws, because Netflix itself is subject to EU laws.
At that point, they have to do so even if their Customer happens to be From and using the service outside the EU.
So they could in theory require Netflix to allow their US-based customer to still access their customer's US library while their customer is travelling in the EU.
They might stop short of doing that, because the EU doesn't have a strong reason to do so, and in a sense, it's the US that needs to pass laws protecting US citizens: cannot rely on the EU to do that for us.
Also the content might be owned by different entities depending upon country. For example Pt1 of Friday the 13th (the original from 1980) is owned by Warner in Europe and by Paramount in the US (which is why we got the uncut version on DVD/BluRay in Europe).