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EU Passes 'Content Portability' Rules Banning Geofencing (torrentfreak.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo writes: The European Parliament has passed draft rules mandating 'content portability', i.e. the ability to take your purchased content and services across borders within the EU. Freedom of movement rules, which allow EU citizens to live and work anywhere in the EU, require that the individual is able to take their life with them -- family, property, and services. Under the new rules, someone who pays for Netflix or BBC iPlayer and then moves to another EU country will retain access to those services and the same content they had previously. Separately, rules to prevent geofencing of content within the EU entirely are also moving forward.

4 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How would EU law apply? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    The UK is still part of the EU until the Article 50 procedure has finished.

  2. Re:Expect to see more content disappear by DRJlaw · · Score: 4, Informative

    No. Are you equating states in the US to countries in the EU?

    That would not be a valid comparison legally or historically.

    It's a perfectly valid comparison to anyone who actually knows the history of the United States from colonial times through ~1800.

  3. Re:Expect to see more content disappear by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Informative

    The EU has already removed geofencing for a very large number of things. Goods, services, capital and people. There is nothing to stop someone in France taking a loan from a bank in Romania, or someone in Germany buying a DVD from an online store based in Latvia.

    It's no different to Californians being able to buy stuff from Michigan if they want to. Or someone in London buying from a shop in Hull. Sky charges the same price to the most deprived council estate and multi-million pound town houses in Mayfair.

    These businesses have a choice. Charge everyone the same as the law requires, or give up and make exactly â0.00.

    Your scheme of charging different amounts for different languages would likely attract some legal action from the EU. The courts are not that dumb, and unlike the US they tend to implement the spirit of the law which is to be fair to all citizens and enforce freedom of movement.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  4. Re: Expect to see more content disappear by corychristison · · Score: 3, Informative

    A sale does note equal requiring translation.

    You have no idea what langauge your customer speaks, or if they speak many languages including the language your software supports.

    If your software is English, and someone from Czech wants to buy your software, you are not required to translate it into Czech. As long as it's clear what langauge your software supports, and the customer understands this, and still wants to buy it there is no reason to translate it into the customers locale.

    What makes you think you're required to support more than one language?

    Now, if you go ahead and offer said translations available for sale, offering differing price points for different locales most definitely should be illegal. If you cant set your price at a point that encompasses all of the labour involved in creating it, then you simply misunderstand business, where the rule is always "Charge everyone more".