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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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