Borderless Media Consumption: Geoblocking Reform | Hacker News Reader

Borderless Media Consumption: Geoblocking Reform

fuen.org

67 pointstosh44 comments

I don't know how you can make progress on this problem without addressing how people involved in creative projects get paid.

Do you make it illegal for geographic regions to be part of a contract? When you license a piece of music for a project, does the musician get paid the same for an internal corporate training video as they would for a national TV commercial campaign or for a global Disney film?

One of my favorite TV shows from my childhood is WKRP in Cincinnati. That show was set in a radio station and so there was a lot of music in it. As I understand it, that music was licensed for broadcast TV and so if you buy a DVD set or if a streamer licenses it, they swap out the music because the home video and streaming rights were never secured.

Geoblocking feels like the same kind of problem. Things destined for a smaller audience pay less for licensing.

> Do you make it illegal for geographic regions to be part of a contract?

Probably not:

> It does not intend to adopt new legislative measures but relies on a joint commitment by the stakeholders.

How is it licenced now? You make a song for a netflix show, and maybe 5k people see that episode, or that show becomes really popular and millions of people see that show.... do you get paid the same? Why would it make a difference if all of those people are US netflix subscribers, or if half of them are outside of US?

It’s not that you as the musician care, but your royalties are part of the overall fee that that broadcaster pays for rights to broadcast the content. Those fees differ based on the region because the broadcaster can make different amounts of money in each region.

A broadcaster in a low GDP country is going to make less in absolute money than in a high GDP country. That translates into lower payouts for the musician.

Something like Netflix where the content creator is also the global broadcaster is different but not all that much so. Netflix will get less in revenue from a subscriber in a low GDP territory and so will want to pay a smaller amount of money (same portion of the local pie) for those views.

It would be unthinkable to somehow outlaw "geographic licensing".

Imagine how sports rights work. In country A there is a football league which people from country A are happy to pay $50 a month to watch. They can also consider watching the Country B league, but are only ready to pay $5 for that. In country B the situation is the opposite.

If rights had to be sold at the same price, then the maximum you could charge is $5 for either league in either country. And if you could subscribe across borders with differing prices, then everyone in Country A would buy the subscription from Country B and save 90%.

I think the more likely scenario is that the price would be $50/mo in both countries. Nobody would be willing to buy it in the foreign country, but dropping the price would sacrifice too much profit in the home country to be worth it.

Right. And this just hurts everyone in the end. The league might have half its viewers and income in other countries (lots of $5 viewers spread out over dozens of countries together add up). So not being able to sell it is a big loss.

Likewise for me as a $50 viewer, since the league has less money and this less quality.

Without differentiated demand-base pricing there will simply be inefficiency that means everyone loses. The geo restrictions is what enables market pricing, not the opposite.

The solution is right there. You pay $50 regardless of whether you are in country A or B Alan’s get access to both leagues. As a fan of club X I might only be interested in games club X plays in or would at least be willing to pay a lot more for these games, but I still pay for the entire league.

I think that removing geoblocking is an important step for the single market and the creation of a shared European identity.

That would be great, but you just shifted the problem into “make all leagues agree about deals for broadcast rights” which is about as easy as making hbo and Netflix agree on a package deal.

Exactly right, if you don't have clearance you either need to gain it (at a cost mostly) or you swap or edit it out.

While i applaud the concept to destroy all borders, physical or otherwise, this introduction of the article left me troubled:

> It's a nuisance for many: While one can move through Europe seemingly without borders when travelling (if there is not a pandemic)

This used to be mostly true ten years ago. Nowadays identity checks are very common (even pre-pandemic) on many transport lines, and most bus companies won't let you board a bus without an ID card. Some borders have been militarized (for example in Calais) while others are heavily guarded and simply having a darker skin tone in the wrong mountain or train station will prompt checks (for example at the France/Italy border).

I'm not sure about what borders you're coming from, but I've been traveling a lot pre-pandemic between Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, and did not have to show my ID at all at the border.

Trains do start to ask for IDs, but this is unrelated to borders : it seems to become standard for oui sncf, even for internal trains, and probably the buses are on the same track for some reason.

> and did not have to show my ID at all at the border

Yes it's not exactly a physical checkpoint anymore. The "douanes" (border patrol) can control you on their whole national territory: for example they patrol and control a lot of people in train stations and on highways.

> Trains do start to ask for IDs, but this is unrelated to borders

I don't think it's unrelated to borders. Nation States across Europe are building their social control arsenal, and knowing who's going where is certainly part of it. Not many years ago you could buy a train ticket without having a name attached to it. Now for the past decades or so there's strict regulations forcing telecoms/transport providers to register information about everyone using their services, to fight terrorism they said (cough cough).

I can at least speak for France where i know the politics pretty well. Since the late 80s there's been a resurgence of racist politics (lois Pasqua-Debré and the first massive waves of deportations) that's only been rising ever since. Government control everywhere (eg. Vigipirate armed military patrols, border patrols, cameras, asking for papers to get on a bus/train) is not just about border control, as the fucking psychopaths running the intelligence services want to know everything about everyone.

But it's certainly related: border checks which had almost disappeared (except for drug smuggling) are now very common if you're not a white person, and there's thousands of cops (regular PAF and riot police CRS) employed at all times to ensure nobody's crossing the border into France, and that if they do they'll get caught somewhere else on the territory, imprisoned in inhumane conditions in one of the CRAs (for up to 90 days, up from 45 before Macron's presidency) and duly deported.

Small example to prove my point: in the big cities in France (but also in Belgium and probably others), ticket checks in public transports are used as a means to arrest undocumented folks. They usually don't have money or ticket, so when they get checked the agents will call the police who'll get them arrested simply for failing to have papers. It's also become common in the past ten years to see actual police officers (not transport security/controllers) establishing checkpoints in metro stations and directly controlling the papers (not tickets) of anyone who's not white enough despite this being clearly forbidden by law.

You may be interested to take a read at some articles about what's happening at the French borders (Calais, Ventimille, etc). Thousands of cops attacking people's camps, raiding squats and private properties, detaining people for "assistance to undocumented people" (a crime)... So many easily avoidable deaths, so much easily avoidable suffering. Usually french politics is a good barometer for how fascist Europe is on average (spoiler: very bad and it keeps getting worse).

I'm in the US, so see this from a bit more abstract point of view, but I understand the insanity of being just over a border and not being able to watch/listen to media in the same language.

This is an awesome idea, I just wish I wasn't so cynical about the likelihood of any success... cash flow is jut a very big motivator.

Until we as a species grow past the greed that drives too many of us, I fear these fights will be long, slow, and provide little gain.

I applaud everyone working for that first inch, though, and maybe this is the first step in breaking down these systems.

Canadian here, and [this content is not available in your region]

Amazon.com vs .ca, audible.com vs .ca…

Drives me up a wall

I'd say having unfettered internet access is a bigger concern in oppressive regimes than being geo-blocked since this a choice that OTT companies make.

As a person who lived in 5 European countries (academic mobility is a great idea, but there are some issues like this), I applaud this. I am not optimistic, though: this is finally a sane regulation, not a like of "cookie law": usually, these are dumped.

At least with mobile roaming it was done.

I didn't read the ePrivacy directive, but I always wondered if it is truly dumb. I suspect that it was /marketed/ as dumb by ad network so as to nudge users into clicking the "whatever, go ahead and profile me" button.

I worked for an EU music startup that had to negotiate the rights across all these territories. I would guess a significant portion of our budget went into getting the right signatures and then localizing for dozens of different languages and cultures.

I made the IP restrictions as loose as I possibly could, because it was bullshit, and honestly the IP holders aren't exactly micromanaging this and checking it, and I had plausible deniability because IP checks are not anywhere near 100% accurate.

It sounds like these people are naïve, I don't think they know much about broadcasting/media.

It sounds nice and utopian for the consumer, but do the economics even stack up, who is paying for this, most likely the consumer or the creative.

How could it even work with all the existing contracts in place, I'd assume they would need to continue, so even in this fantasy it would only be for new content, and how many years before that reaches tipping point?

*edit: less harsh

Using Netflix as an example. Without a VPN, some countries have less than 10% of the USA's movie/show library for the same price after conversion. This is ridiculous of course. And then there's locale shows (Danish, Polish, Japanese...) which aren't aired outside of those countries or a set of allowed countries.

I don't disagree its annoying for a consumer, I live in Europe. However, a publisher has to license the content from a producer, that producer (or distributor) sets the price on a regional basis. In the US the ROI likely stacks up better than for Luxemburg. A publisher (Netflix etc) would prefer to have a simpler model, but it has to make sense financially. Part of the reason large publishers are also increasingly producers, not just for exclusivity of content.

Here in the UK, we are forced to pay for the TV license which funds the BBC, but go to a different country and we lose access to the service with no refund possible.

yes, that's a shitty user experience but the TV license is the problem not your lack of access to it. sorry you're stuck with that.

Also an issue is that the BBC may own rights to broadcast in the UK, but not other countries, so even if they wanted to, they would have legal issues with crossing borders.

This could be easily mitigated by legal regulations on the national level. Even if a contract tried to enforce it, the law precedes contractual obligations.

I don't understand how that would work. If the UK passes a law stating that TV license payers are allowed to watch BBC programmes (e.g. iPlayer) in say, Belgium, then if a rights owner prosecutes the BBC for breach of contract (in Belgium) how would UK law be applicable?

Exactly, BBC would need publishing rights in all countries the viewers would wish to watch it in. Unless they changed all there existing agreements with rights holders to not be constrained by territories, which they aren't going to do, or at least only for a lot of money (and even then they might not be able to if the rights are already granted exclusively to someone else).

I don't think that's how it works. It can be distributed in UK following UK laws yet accessed from some other place. If i borrow a DVD from my local library and travel abroad with it, my library is not infringing on anything and neither am i.

That's not how it works. IP addresses were never a location information to begin with. Many people in your country have a "foreign" IP, and many people from other countries have IPs from your country: yes that's how the Internet works. IPs are technical identifiers, not ID cards. Due to this, it was already pointed out over a decade ago that public services blocking certain IP ranges led to terrible inequalities: for example there is (or at least used to be not long ago) many public services French citizens residing in the French colonies (DOM/TOM) could not access despite paying taxes and officially residing on French territory. The same is true with some ISPs (eg. mobile operators) who use "foreign" IP ranges with dynamic IPs: you can be physically in metropolitan France yet be denied access to certain services.

As the VPN market has shown, filtering by IP address does not filter by country and therefore does not fulfill a contractual obligation for limited distribution. Whoever claims otherwise is misinformed or deliberately lying.

Also, very important note: unless the BBC has established offices/activities in Belgium, there's nothing to be sued about. As a british organization abiding by british laws, they couldn't care less what the Brussels copyright mafia has to say in belgian courts. The only exception to this i can think of is when the US copyright mafia gets involved and they will bribe (see The Pirate Bay trials) and push for foreign arrests (see Kim Dotcom arrest) because US government is subservient to their interests.

Now for my personal opinion: fuck copyright, fuck "rightholders", fuck the police and fuck the mafia. Just abolish money and private property: we have enough resources for everyone to live decently if we don't concentrate them in the hands of wealthy fuckers who'd like us all to suffer for their greed. Let the people who want to create art do so, and let the people who want to enjoy it do that too.

The unintended consequence of banning nation specific licensees, is that you'd essentially be giving a huge advantage to the already global services. Any service that isn't global, wouldn't be able to compete with those who already are.

Netflix is global, Prime is on its way, and Disney and HBO are trying. But a BBC streaming service is going to outbid 10/10 times because they can't afford to buy North American streaming rights when they don't have a (viable) North American service.

The BBC would survives because the law mandates UK citizen pay for it. But any non-subsidized local service would be dead in the water.

Don't you think it's a good thing if public money from the BBC is used to develop interesting programs instead of subsidizing Hollywood blockbusters? Who cares if i can't watch Spiderman on BBC STREAM? I've got torrents for that :-)

More seriously, Netflix business model is deeply broken. Trying to replicate that at all cost with public money is doomed to failure. A decent alternative would be the Global License [0] which was at the center of french public debate 15 years ago. It's more or less the same model, but without trying to feed ~parasites~ shareholders on the way, and without stupid competition between 5 different streaming services you all need a subscription for.

[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_globale

you don't have to pay it

However, the law says that you do need a license to watch or record any programmes shown on TV on any channel (not just BBC) on any device.

so? they can't prove it unless you let them into your house. fuck them.

They can get a warrant to make a forced entry if they have probable cause to believe you are watching TV without a licence.

https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/about/foi-administering-the-li...

(odd that licensing is with an S but licence in British is with a C)