EU irate about geo-locked Apple IDs
theregister.com
theregister.com
> Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.
https://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_pos...
My question is, "where does the requirement that content be licensed in only one country" contractually originate?
From the Vivendis and EMIs who want to sell the same song to Britons at a higher price than the Romanians will pay.
It's not like countries aren't in on the action, too. Mandatory notices, censorship laws, et cetera vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
Force the rights holders to only sell their digital content DRM-free.
You'd also have to convince the EU governments to normalise their content regulations. Good luck with that.
The only convincing that needs to happen is for all the EU Council members (head of government of each member state) to vote for the regulation/directive, and the majority of the EU parliament members to vote for it.
Typically between the original rightsholder and distributors.
Let's say you're an american film maker and you make a film. You'll need a distribution company, and that company will want exclusive rights to distribute. But, the best US distributors might not do a good job overseas, so maybe you can give them US/CA rights and find a different distributor in Europe. Now, in Europe, you probably need a different distributor for UK/IE vs contintental Europe where they'll need to handle subtitling and whatnots.
This is needed to get films into cinemas. But the distributors are also involved with films on disc and films on streaming services. And the territorialism follows there too.
I was attempting to build a small collection of decent stuff and didn't expect that I would have to move country, much less that my library decided to stay behind. So pissed off.
You didn’t own any content to build a collection with; you held licenses.
The content owners are the studios and they decide where to sell their content, in which legal jurisdictions and for how much.
As a license holder you don’t have rights to the content in every jurisdiction. As much as I hate to rep with folk like the MPAA if there are different laws in different areas, they can’t have a one size fits all solution.
(I sail the seven seas as my one size fits all solution because if buying isn’t owning then…)
Secondly, I already bought the thing, I don’t care that the thing is no longer sold where I happen to be standing. The rights holders already got their money.
If retail suddenly means that one side gets to renegotiate the deal, then yeah, I think we have a problem. Give me the money back.
I’m well aware how licensing content works, I just want post-purchase shenanigans to stop.
Any space on that boat?
I think many people here support that. It's the blaming of Apple that we are finding problematic.
You know the laws and want somebody to blame. I don't like it either. I would definitely support changes. I keep my collection 90% DRM free for this reason, though. Well, I suppose my DVD's aren't DRM free, but you can't make my physical player disappear by flipping a switch in Cupertino.
[Ed: Ok, I read TFA. The connection between the geo-locked apple ID's and the per-country availability & pricing isn't well explained.]
I know. As you guys do in absolutely every thread vaguely critical of Apple, without exception, no matter the topic.
e.g. Bought all eight films in the collection of a well-known series about a wizarding school. Move country. Film number 4 vanishes into thin-air. Just gone. Have to buy film again in current country.
e.g. Bought entire collection of classic British comedy about some senior governmental tomfoolery. Whole collection vanishes on move. Then about three months later reappears. Then a few weeks later disappears. Then reappears again. Then disappears.
So the laws aren't causing this, but they do need to resolve this. Licensing media might be harder than the Good Friday Agreement, but I refuse to accept that it's impossible, and consumers should just suck it up. I don't have any kind of contract with anyone but Apple, so they really should take responsibility.
I keep buying CDs at €1 or £1 each from the local secondhand-kaufhäuser or charity shop, and the house is littered with thousands of CDs and the only break-up clause I would worry about with regard to those is the one with my other half, not with who I bought them from.
This is a completely solved problem. In essence, movies and TV shows aren't any different from music in that regard. The only issue is that there hasn't been enough regulatory scrutiny regarding this when it comes to videos.
We need governments to step in, force the same system that we have for music also for video content, and slap anyone who violates the regulations with billions of dollars of fines.
Just like with Apps it is the developers and not Apple. Developers can check the “worldwide” box and be done with it. But for various reasons sometimes you have to exclude a country. I’ve been in a position where legal asked to not publish a specific app in some countries because local laws made that app “difficult” to exist.
The EU cannot fix this.
Of course it can. Ban country-specific licensing arrangements in the EU.
Sure. I'm saying politically it's DOA.
No, they really do not. At most, they can decide "in EU" vs not.
If Apple allows anything more fine-grained, they are violating EU law.
The reason why Netflix doesn’t have a single library for the EU is because EU licensees claim rights in various countries both on the original content as well as on localization via dubbing and subtitles.
This isn’t on Netflix it would be far cheaper for them to have a single world wide license for the majority of their content rather than having to negotiate regional deals.
And not for nothing but the EU geo blocking directive explicitly does not cover audio-visual content and they’ve voted against extending it just at the beginning of this year after heavy lobbying by EU media companies especially those in sports.
So it is perfectly legal to geo block both on demand audio-visual content and live broadcasts within in the EU.
The music industry in general has a long history of being fractionalized by country and region. The laws and regulations, especially around music publishing, are literally different in almost every country around the globe, with specific PROs and CMOs collecting publishing and performance royalties country by country. You can imagine the inefficiency that creates.
That, combined with a history of distribution through physical, not digital media, creates a system that ends up being a massive web of regional licensing deals, collection webs, and opaque royalty flows that have held over to this day.
It's not a great system.
Hypothetically, what happens if the EU bans Apple's practices (at a bare minimum, the blatantly deceptive advertising letting you think you're "buying" a piece of media) and lets the effects trickle down to the other culprits?
Decide what I get to buy where? Sure, that still sucks but at least makes some marginal sense.
But why on earth should they get to confiscate stuff I’ve already paid for once I move countries?
https://www.apple.com/uk/legal/internet-services/itunes/uk/t...
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- Purchased Content will generally remain available for you to download, redownload, or otherwise access from Apple. Though it is unlikely, subsequent to your purchase, Content may be removed from the Services and become unavailable for further download or access from Apple (for instance, because Apple loses its right from the Content provider to make it available). To ensure your ability to continue enjoying Content, we encourage you to download all purchased Content to a device in your possession and to back it up.
"""
But that doesn’t mean it makes any sense economically. I’m much less likely to buy a movie (as opposed to renting it) that way, for example.
And redownloading after moving does work for some types of content (e.g. books on Amazon, I believe music for Apple etc.), so it’s really just a matter of a lack of urgency to negotiate this.
I spent a few years as a nomad, and the amount of shit you have to deal with when moving country is ridiculous. It's fine if you're just on holiday and have a consistent country of residence, but actually moving country seems like a total edge case for half the services.
Spotify playlists that alter strangely from country to country. Any of the streaming services radically alter their available shows from country to country. Books that you thought you bought on Amazon suddenly disappear from your Kindle.
And, of course, the language problem. Most of the services assume that if you live in a country then you speak the major language of that country. I mean, I get it, but they know that I've set my preferences to English in their app. My browser tells them what language I prefer. I don't understand why my IP address overrules all of that.
Anyway, all of this goes away if you just pirate it all. You can get what you want, in the language you want, the format you want, and store it on your hard drive so you can play it while offline. It all just gets easier and better. It's got nothing to do with the cost - I'd happily pay for the content, as long as they actually let me own it.
> More specifically, the CPC takes issue with the fact that Apple restricts user accounts – or Apple IDs – to being able to access storefronts, pay for products or download apps only from the country where an account is registered – a practice "which is not allowed under EU's anti-geo-blocking rules." The EC noted that this creates problems when EU citizens travel to different countries in the bloc, and noted that Apple customers "face significant challenges" when attempting to change their country of registration.
Is this about app availability? I doubt it, aren't most developers going to make their app available Europe-wide? Why would you care that you can't get the Italian app "storefront" because you're French? And if a developer makes something Italy-only, isn't that their choice?
Or is this about media purchases? Which doesn't have anything to do with Apple, but rather with content licenses.
Because this article doesn't provide even a single concrete example of what it's talking about, so it's hard to figure out what the complaint even is.
Because you might be traveling in Italy and try to use some locally-developed Italian app while you're there, e.g. some municipal public transport app.
Or you might even move permanently to Italy while staying a French citizen (and having your Apple ID still registered as French).
> And if a developer makes something Italy-only, isn't that their choice?
I think the entire point is that, in the EU, it's not.
So why does there even need to be a law around this at all? Presumably apps want to be popular and aren't going to limit themselves to 1 country in the EU.
So what is the problem the EU is even trying to solve here? I'm genuinely asking, because not a single example is given. I don't want something theoretical, I'm asking where is a case of someone experiencing actual harm. Because it's very hard to understand this otherwise.
Is this actually about apps? Or is it about licensed content like music? Is it anything Apple even has power to change here?
If the software or movie or whatever is licensed for use in the UK, and you go to France… you’re not in the UK. You don’t have a license to view it right?
Unless they someone get rid of licensing geo-restrictions would this accomplish anything?
Or would this work in the EU because maybe by law anything you buy in France would also be licensed in other EU countries like Germany, so you should be able to use another EU country store?
I guess that leaves me with the big question: why are there multiple markets. Why didn’t Apple just set up an EU one from the start? The shared market has been around longer than Apple has been selling digital stuff.
Maybe it just started out as a way to handle the different languages and sort of evolved to where it is today even though since it’s now more than just music it doesn’t make as much sense?
App Store was/is built on top of the iTunes Store infrastructure which was launched only 10 years after the EU single market was created. And it was designed to support music purchases where licensing by country is the standard.
And these purchases are tied to your credit card which even to this day is pinned to a particular country. This is how Apple largely implements geo-blocking.
I knew it was built on the iTunes Store because I’ve heard stories over the years from developers on podcasts about how sort of creaky it is. It always sounded like they were totally unprepared for the app explosion and not ready to handle that kind of volume in something that was more complicated than a simple song file that never changed.
But shouldn’t music licensing in the EU not have been by country at that point?
Considerable part of the push with Digital Single Market is that it should be, well, single market.
Now I’m just left with the question of how Apple ended up in this configuration of stores. See my reply under the sibling comment to yours.
However there are two issues here, first is that apps and services (with a few exceptions) are generally not allowed to be geo blocked unlike on demand media and live broadcasting and secondly and what is most likely the main issue here is that Apple using the country where the account is registered in rather than the location of the user at the time of service.
The former is a likely violation of the directive and the latter for sure is.
Detain any executives on-sight as well.
Big corpo cannot be allowed to pretend they are above government.