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Comment by jogjayr | Hacker News Reader

Wait wait...French law as in law by the French government? You get hit wit fines by the government if you defy it? Or an industry norm like "If you allow streaming within 36 months of a theatrical release we won't talk to you/union workers won't work for you/no awards for you"?

If it's an actual law, that sounds utterly absurd. Good on Netflix for not playing ball.

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Welcome to France :)

We have laws on the percentage of "foreign" music you are allowed to play on radio stations (to fight against the evil english language), laws that prevent TV channels from playing films on friday or saturday evening (to protect those poor cinemas), laws that govern the number of pharmacies by number of inhabitants and disallow ownership of multiple pharmacies or ownership by non-pharmacists (to protect them against the great evil that is competition)...

> laws that govern the number of pharmacies by number of inhabitants and disallow ownership of multiple pharmacies or ownership by non-pharmacists

While that seems a bit over the top, I find the part where it must be owned by a pharmacist quite reasonable. It's the same in Germany.

It sounds logical at first, but combined with the single-ownership rule, it's actually a clever way to protect the "mom&pop store" model. Which is good for the owners, but bad for the consumers - no economies of scale, no competition, no supermarkets... Like being back in the early 50s

That there should be a licensed pharmacist at all times in the store - fine. But why does the store have to belong to one? To take a stereotypically German example, we don't say that all garages have to be owned by mechanics :)

Yes, it is an actual law made to protect theaters and the movie industry.

More information on it: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronologie_des_m%C3%A9dias

To be a bit more precise, the law on it self doesn't define the delays between different media releases, it only enforce those. Delays are defined by agreement between the different industry actors. I guess that the fact there's no big French streaming company make those delays quite unbalanced in favor of movies theatres and tv channels (that often produce movies released in theatres)

Yours in calendrical heresy,

Reed Hastings

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