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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.

6 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Expect to see more content disappear by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is that what happens in the US? Less content because it has to be licensed for every state?

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  2. Solves one problem. by Mal-2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This makes the whole bit of Cannes not considering streaming-only films a tempest in a teapot. France won't be able to retain its "can't stream for three years" laws in place and remain in alignment with the content portability rules (which I honestly thought already existed).

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  3. Well refund the cash, then. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If you want to stop someone using what they bought for, then you should refund the payments.

    Which do you prefer? Geoblocking or keeping the cash?

  4. Re:Expect to see more content disappear by alvinrod · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Don't be obtuse. The reason this is a problem is because the EU member countries have a much larger gap in per capita PPP than U.S. states. If you remove geofencing, no sane person is going to pay anything but the bottom rates that the service has to be sold for in poorer countries, which means lost revenue for the services offering content. Since they won't settle for that, it means less content gets offered or that the prices in those poorer countries get increased and fewer people can afford the services. About the only other alternative is adjusting prices based on language and not offering a full range of subtitles or dubs without paying more.

  5. Re:Expect to see more content disappear by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Your scheme of charging different amounts for different languages would likely attract some legal action from the EU.

    On what basis? Translating a work from one language to another could be a very expensive undertaking. This EU policy is already economically naive, but expecting all translations of works to be provided at the same cost would be economically absurd.

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  6. Re:Expect to see more content disappear by DRJlaw · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But it is not a contextually valid comparison. It doesn't fucking matter how licensing worked two-hundred fucking years ago, what matters is how it works NOW.

    "Legally or historically" includes historically. Presuming that you're the same anonymous coward, you set the criteria, so deal with it.

    It's also contextually valid. You have two confederations of otherwise soverign states. One was the early United States. The other is the modern European Union. The states that became the United States often had constitutions before the U.S. Constitution was ratified. Hell, the states that became the early United States often had passed copyright laws well before the federal Copyright Act of 1790.

    Your ignorance doesn't invalidate the validity of the comparison. It invalidates your opinion concerning the validity of the comparison, though.