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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.
Is that what happens in the US? Less content because it has to be licensed for every state?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The UK is still part of the EU until the Article 50 procedure has finished.
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).
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
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?
UK citizens should stock up on lube while they can.
Unlikely to become law before the UK leaves the EU, so probably irrelevant. However, I suspect iPlayer wouldn't be affected anyway as you're not paying for the service, you're paying a TV license to receive broadcast TV in the UK. While you may not be allowed to use iPlayer without a TV license, that's not the service you're paying for. If you look at the briefing (linked in the article) it mentions the BBC specifically: "The draft regulation would apply to content services ... which are:
(e) free-of-charge online services offered by providers (e.g. public broadcasters such as the BBC) who choose to introduce portable services and agree to verify their subscribers' Member State of residence." So it applies to them if they agree to verify a subscriber's member state of residence, but presumably if they don't agree to do it then it doesn't apply to them. It's also worth noting that the BBC doesn't have subscribers anyway. Of course the text of the law is probably a long way off and who knows what it will actually say (not that it will matter to the BBC by then).
Depends. There's a ton of crap on Netflix for which they've secured distribution rights in larger or English speaking countries, not bothering to get rights for other countries (the selection here in NL is pretty crap compared to the UK or the US). If Netflix is forced to serve these shows to people who move to a different country, effectively they will be forced to secure an EC-wide license. It kind of seems a roundabout way of saying: "Either you license your content for all of Europe or you don't get to sell your license here" (for streaming or downloadable content)
So you may be right: maybe Netflix won't bother. However they have a vested interest here, with a fair number of subscribers and a very healthy growth, Europe is seen as a strategic market for Netflix. And already customers in their fastest-growing markets are starting to complain about the shit selection they get. So perhaps Netflix will instead choose to fight to get those EC-wide rights at a reasonable price. That's a fight that needs to happen if this fragmentation crap is to end some day. Hopefully at some point content providers will see the light and switch to a pay-per-view model like the music industry has, at which point they will beg Netflix to offer the largest possible selection of their content in any and all countries.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Since nothing prevents subscribing to a service from Western Europe in Eastern Europe, the prices have to be the same across the whole region. Major games on Steam are already too expensive for the poorer half of Europe.
For sports, at least, it's licensed by *market* - to watch local sports teams costs more for a carrier. You can get a major league baseball streaming package that lets you watch any game in the country *except* for the team nearest you. To watch your home game you have to subscribe to whichever cable channel holds the broadcast rights, usually Fox Sports or ESPN.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Man, the EU is kicking America's ass in terms of digital rights. Cookie laws, the right to be forgotten, now mandating that people can use what they buy anywhere. You guys got any room for a junior programmer?
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.
For instance, Germany censors media heavily when it contains Nazi imagery... ...does that mean it is now legal for you to access it in Germany if you acquired the access somewhere else in the EU?
It's a perfectly valid comparison to anyone who actually knows the history of the United States from colonial times through ~1800.
Posting to remove incorrect moderation.
That is not going to happen. Every sale lost due to lack of offering is money not made. At the moment, the content mafia still succeeds in hypnotizing everybody into thinking they are important, but the reality is that anybody providing entertainment is a beggar and dependent on the goodwill of their potential benefactors (i.e. customers).
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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
Huh? Government can't control broadcast TV either.
Of course, many European nation has a government-operated broadcaster. They have full control over that one, obviously. But not the 3-4 competing privately owned sports/movie channels. Or any of the neighbour country channels that they're capable of receiving.
Perhaps taxing broadcasters it easier than taxing streamers - but that's about it.
It will presumably still be possible for content providers to supply content to EU nations, unless they have existing exclusive licensing deals with intermediaries from some of those nations already that would now be in competition with their own offering intended for another nation but now applicable EU-wide.
What this will do is mean that selling at a lower price in the less well-off nations is no longer acceptable, so the result is likely to be that some content will now only be legally available to those in the richer EU member states (and piracy will presumably rise in the others for content that was popular there).
As so often happens, the EU is putting its idealised principles ahead of pragmatism and the consequence will be shafting businesses and/or a significant part of its own population.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
So instead of you getting your content everywhere, for most content this effects you will get it no-where.
Only for the people who actually want to pay for it. Everyone else will just torrent it.
Does this mean the piratebay has to be unblocked in the countries that (tried to) block it?
It's a bit more complicated that that, I'll give you an example.
Here in Italy, you cannot watch House of Cards on Netflix because Netflix sold its broadcasting rights to Sky before they entered the Italian market. Now, under these new rules, a German Netflix subscriber will expect to see it even if he moves to Italy. If Netflix allows that, it's liable to be sued by Sky, if they don't, it's now liable to be sued by the German subscriber. It's a legal conundrum I frankly don't know how to disentangle.
It is not really a problem - the German Netflix subscriber is still a German Netflix subscriber if he temporarily stays in Italy. So Netflix just needs to give up restricting streaming by IP (country) and instead determine what you are allowed to watch based on the user's account, i.e. they need to ask for your home address and link it to your account. I guess they then just need to find a way to verify that home address, otherwise everybody will just sign up using a fake address from a country which offers the most shows.
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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Like they could afford to pass up the entire EU market, it's 741 million people and fairly wealthy ones at that. They will comply. While they're fairly liberal when it comes to international restrictions like non-EU vs EU countries, inside the EU there's very strong forces to make it one united market. Most recently they bludgeoned the cell phone operators, you can now roam the whole EU like home for one price. This is the second half, you can enjoy every content like that home. So once this is firmly put in place, I can go anywhere in Europe and watch anything for the same price I could at home. Despite Brexit and all that the "United States of Europe" project is very much on. I'll admit it also has some very clear upsides despite the democratic deficit it has.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The American civil war proved that an American State is not a country.
IANAL. But I'll go out on a limb here and guess that the illegality of an action pretty much voids any contract about performing the aforementioned action in a similar way to Acts of God, force majeur, action of the Queen's enemies etc.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
In many ways it is. Income Tax is the same rate in Liverpool as it is in London. TVA (sales tax, sort of) is the same in Paris as it is in Perpignan.
You can't say the same about Michigan and Montana.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Right. They'll take 100% of nothing rather than 95% of something.
You were is such a froth about OMG Gubmints that you totally failed to think it through.
Why do you think contracts trump laws? Netflix will either suck it up, or pull out and have to refund any subscriptions paid.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Actually yes. The conflict between licensing on streaming services/satellite services/ conventional ppv has limited content that under the original television model would have been available and available as advertising support over the air television.
You can get more now, but it is via seperate purchases,
"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.
Not really. Since this is an EU directive that has to be transposed to law by each member state, Italy will have to allow it by law and Sky has no claim (and this particular directive had a deadline to be transposed by April 2016, a year ago... this part, online rights, is just being addressed now).
If for some absurd reason Netflix is actually sued, any court will just defer it to the ECJ (European Court of Justice), that in turn would refer to the directive and do a face palm on how would a case like that reach them. Case closed.
We're used to being shafted by the free market. That won't change.
It sounds like you're about to be shafted by your government, not the free market, .
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
France can very well keep that rule. Because the portability rule , the one spoken in the article, is only about people coming from , say , UK, and in France, could not use the BBC player because it checked for your rough location, so people coming in France and using their own streaming in a private setting. Business in France cannot import content. That is the second part about geofencing is, and will be lobbied against far more harder than the geo portability issue.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Reminds me of Windows XP, where Latvian version was twice as cheap as English, but you couldn't switch to English. That was clearly market segmentation move.
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".
Oh, this'll be fun.
So people from Spain that have set top boxes and pay peanuts for rights to watch the English Premier League will be able to take their boxes with them to the UK and watch skipping the huge mark up that BT and Sky put on their services to watch the games.
Previously, this was against the law and people were fined for it, now it seems, that's fine.
The English Football League is going to be glad for Brexit now.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
Translating a work from one language to another could be a very expensive undertaking
Since you used the word "could" and thus seem unsure about it, let me clear it up for you: it isn't. Only a few major languages have audio dubbing, and subtitles cost next to nothing to make.
I'm not unsure about it at all. I've worked on a variety of professional projects, including software/UIs, written content and even video material, where translation has been an issue. Sometimes it's a significant expense. Sometimes it is relatively modest compared to the overall cost of the product or service. That's why I wrote "could".
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Not according to AniMoJo's interpretation, apparently.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. No control group to compare against.
But with Thatcher Mk2 at the helm things can only get better!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The EU has open borders. Today for the ordinary people the borders are higher then every. Data is being blocked. Phone calls are extremely expensive in another EU state. 10 minutes of internet on a smartphone and you will lose hundreds of euro. But social dumping? No problem. Organized criminality? The more the merrier. Terrorists? Not all Muslims are like that you racist!. The EU is a failure.
This regional blocking has been a problem since digital television. I grew up with French and German television as a kid when signals were still send to antenna. Today in the digital age when there are few technical limitations the channels I grew up with are all blocked because I'm a Belgian. No more WDR, no more ADR, no more TF1, no more ITV, no more RTL, all blocked.
But I do get lots of channels with those funny curly names (In Arabic). Of course the EU is there to cater towards the Muslims. We have more Arabic channels then West European channels at the moment. And those Arabic channels have nothing but preachers on them. What are they preaching? Nobody knows. I repeat the EU is a failure. They are fast with regulations, they are way behind with deregulations. And now this news.
How long will it take to make a decision. How long can the lobbyist block the decision. And when finally the borders are opened for content, how long will it take until it's finally available? We're still waiting for non expensive roaming since 1997 (!!!!). A few months ago I still received a bill of 270 euro because I was streaming music on my iPhone while going for a run and I apparently moved too close to the Dutch border (without crossing it!).
And the latest years you see that the EU is welcoming to the millions of 'refugees' who want to profit from the European civilization they love to hate. But it are the people who have to live with them, not the Eurocrats. Our local swimming pool was invaded by pussy grabbing refugees. The police didn't do anything. A civil patrol was organized to protect our own people and this is when the police intervened: "no extreme right patrols on our watch!". Today the swimming pool is closed. And when something like this happens, the Eurocrats are fast to wave their finger at that naughty indigenous European. Do you think it is a surprise why the so called extreme right is on the rise?
expecting all translations of works to be provided at the same cost would be economically absurd.
Why?
The cost of translating is relatively low. Translators don't get paid much, unless they are doing really specialist work. And the EU is familiar with this because it does a lot of translation work with its own material.
The only time it might get expensive is with dubbing, rather than just subtitles. Subtitles are so cheap and easy that anime fans do them for free, just because they enjoy it. Dubbing is more work, but even then you would find it very hard to justify charging more because the argument would be made that you did the dubbing to increase sales and revenue.
Anyway, there is clear evidence that companies won't charge more for translated versions. Cinema tickets/DVDs are cheaper in Romania than in the UK, even though American movies in the UK don't need any translation work doing at all.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The vast majority of the expense is in the initial programming / setup / design of whatever you present to the user, even on TV. Once you have that down pat the rest can be sent to a translator for a few cents.
Synchronising subtitles to audio on screen costs more than translating those subtitles into 50 different languages and given the requirement for English closed captions it becomes a sunk cost.
The same with software. Re-writing code to translate everything into a different language is expensive. Writing a program to read the interface from a file is the same cost. Sending the file to a translator costs next to nothing, especially for lesser known languages.
lesser known = languages from cheaper countries.
It's almost like slashdot needs a preview button :-)
...is once again on the side of the consumer. It's as if the citizens of the EU actually had a say.
For that to be the case, it would have to be sold at below cost in those poorer countries, since a profit of 1p is still more than a revenue of 0 when you've already paid to produce the goods or service.
That doesn't follow if pricing in the poorer and richer states is artificially forced to the same level by law.
Which would be dumping and proof that the free market is broken and cannot and will not work.
These laws mean it's not a free market. They artificially constrain pricing so that suppliers can't offer what consumers want at a price they are willing to pay for it. They call it a "single market" but in reality when purchasing power is so different in different parts of it, it's not naturally a single market at all.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The ability to sell financial services, with harmonised rules, over the entire EU is one of the four basic freedoms that comes with membership.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The same with software. Re-writing code to translate everything into a different language is expensive. Writing a program to read the interface from a file is the same cost.
But writing code to read the interface from a file rather than encoding it in some other way may be a significant cost in itself. Perhaps more significantly, in internationalised UIs, we're typically not just talking about translating text. The whole infrastructure of your UI code may need to be different to support different time and date conventions, currency conventions, address and phone number formats, and so on. Again, the cost of generalising here may be quite significant, and it is not necessarily the same work with trivial language substitutions from one market to another. This all assumes that the functionality of your software isn't itself tied to some local standards, so it's just the UI that you need to localise.
If you think doing this for a large piece of software, with a complex UI that includes a lot of specialist terminology and notation, that needs to support a lot of different geographical and linguistic regions, costs "next to nothing", then I have to think that you've never actually done it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The cost of translating is relatively low. Translators don't get paid much, unless they are doing really specialist work.
I think you're assuming some sort of direct translation, for something like a document or the soundtrack of a movie. If you're talking about something more complicated, like the UI for a software product that includes other aspects that might need to be localised for each regional market, it's an entirely different question.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I don't disagree with that, but having a freedom to do something doesn't mean you're going to want to do that thing.
Cross border costs = language, postage, security, risk. Business to business â volumes are likely enough for these costs to be minimal, but the overhead will likely be a much bigger % for niche non-business consumers.
Good luck living in France and trying to get a mortgage from a Romanian bank.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
No. Are you equating states in the US to countries in the EU?
That would not be a valid comparison legally or historically.
For how the EU works it is a fair comparison. Many regulations and laws are pan EU. The EU is barely a single step from becoming a de-facto a United States of Europe which is why the UK wanted to leave. It is literally just the lack of an EU army and total monetary union that prevents it from being. Judicially and Legislatively it is pretty much the same as the US with each country having its own laws/regulations as well as EU wide laws/regulations no different from State and Federal legislation/regulations.
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But writing code to read the interface from a file rather than encoding it in some other way may be a significant cost in itself.
Sunk cost. There's a world outside America. If you want to be part of it you can either set yourself up for failure or do it efficiently allowing for easy translation afterwards.
Perhaps more significantly, in internationalised UIs, we're typically not just talking about translating text. The whole infrastructure of your UI code may need to be different to support different time and date conventions, currency conventions, address and phone number formats, and so on.
Have you programmed such UIs before? Most of this is handled by locales in the OS and in the underlying API. Beyond that the rest of it is very simplified too. There's two date standards, the US one and the rest of the world. If you're in the EU you've already sorted this out. Within the EU there's only 2 number / currency formats, the one used in the UK and the one used on the mainland. Addresses need nothing special other than don't restrict post codes to numbers only and ask for house number and street name separately and give people an optional apartment field. You've again covered most of Europe with these simple facts. Telephone numbers, well no one really sorts these out but the easy way is to simply reject any entry without a preceding + then you have a system everyone in the world can use.
You're way over thinking this. One point of the EU is that the block of countries is actually incredibly similar in everything they do.
And if your software is tied to some local standards than I'm sure someone in Bulgaria is not interested if your French only software won't run on his machine making the entire point moot.
If you think doing this for a large piece of software, with a complex UI that includes a lot of specialist terminology and notation, that needs to support a lot of different geographical and linguistic regions, costs "next to nothing", then I have to think that you've never actually done it.
No if you're doing this for a large piece of software then you've thought about it in advance making the transference between countries trivial OR you haven't even thought about selling it to other countries, much less thought about localising it for them for a cheaper price and locking out others.
It is easy if you allow it to be.
There's a world outside America. If you want to be part of it you can either set yourself up for failure or do it efficiently allowing for easy translation afterwards.
I know; I'm not American. But you're grossly oversimplifying the commercial decisions here.
Have you programmed such UIs before? Most of this is handled by locales in the OS and in the underlying API.
Yes I have, and no it's not. You're talking about trivial details like the conventions for printing dates and times or getting the right currency symbol. That's the easy stuff. Even things like addressing aren't nearly as easy as you're making them out to be. (Obvious example: How will you match up your proposed address schema with the databases for validating payment credentials, which almost certainly won't be in the same format? Get this one wrong and large numbers of purchases in the affected country may simply fail, so think before you answer.)
One point of the EU is that the block of countries is actually incredibly similar in everything they do.
Again, that's the nice, ideal world theory talking. In reality, the EU is composed of many member states with their own cultures and languages and conventions, not to mention very different economics. Even simple things like paying for things work sometimes completely differently in different nations within the EU. And again, we're only talking about the visible surface here. Under the surface, if whatever your software deals with is itself sensitive to the local context, it's an entirely different game again.
If you really think i18n support is some sort of binary state, then again, I'm afraid that's just lack of experience on your part talking. That's understandable, because like much in software development you don't see all the little details until you try to do it for real. But the situation is still what it is, and the cost of porting even an already internationalised code base to support some new location still isn't necessarily trivial.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
You realise this is talking about other countries within in the EU, don't you? Because it seems as if you don't.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The Czech republic is a really bad example here, because, from my personal experience (visited the country often in the past, had a Czech girlfriend) the Czech generally aren't that good with foreign languages. My (not so good) Czech was often more helpful than my (quite good) English or (native) German.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Why do they call it a civil war then?
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Not really. EU is a confederation with some federal structures but still a long way from becoming an actual federation, USA is clearly a federation and has been one longer than EU has existed.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The American civil war proved that an American State is not a country.
Calling it a civil war implies that it IS a country. A civil war being a war within a single country; which you knew, of course.
It would have been called the Secessionary War, like the Revolutionary war was a 'revolution' theoretically (eh, it wasn't really a revolution, but we call it the Revolutionary War). The people of the southern states were trying to separate politically, not overthrow the federal government. Secessionary War makes more sense than Revolutionary War, for the wars in question.