This isn't quite as exciting as the headline on the Torrentfreak article, but potentially some good news and a positive step on the road toward ending at least some region blocking and regional pricing.

EU Commissioner Wants to Abolish Netflix-Style Geoblocking - article at Torrentfreak [url=http://ec.europa.eu/commission/2014-2019/ansip_en ]Andrus Ansip[/url] - EU Commission Team Leader for Digital Single Market

I really hope this gets through, In Spain we don't get BBC iplayer or Netflix due to restrictions. I don't really understand it though, is it legal reasons? But in any case due to the amount of bureocracy it would take years before something happens.

BBC iPlayer is an odd case - the content is paid for via the UK licence fee and it shouldn't be freely available to anyone outside the UK, but I think there is paid access from outside the UK, so if the EU geoblocking is outlawed I assume it should become possible for any EU member to get some form of subscription. It's the licensing contracts, I think motivated mainly by regional pricing and advertising requirements. If publishers can get away with charging UK and German subscribers much higher fees they will. Spain may be ignored entirely as publishers think Spanish copyright law is too weak, subscribers won't pay enough and piracy is rampant.

The advertising issue is related, say a UK commercial TV channel wants to buy the right to show a movie, they want to make sure that the viewers will see the adverts paid for by UK advertisers. If viewers can get the movie cheaper from another channel outside the UK, viewing figures could drop too much and the advertisers will stop buying air time, so the TV channel will cease making a profit. So the terms of the licence to show the movie will stipulate that geoblocking is in place.

Then there is the issue of censorship, given the opportunity many German customers would rather get their games and movies from the UK to avoid heavy handed German censorship, so that would be bad for German TV channels and publishers. Hence the geoblocking.

I think most people would argue that the business models are now out of date, the censorship is out if date and it's only right that businesses should find new ways to compete in the digital era.

Let's hope they achieve the same kind of breakthrough they did with roaming charges and icross-border phone calls.

Copyright is still mostly national in practice, with different rights holders per country. A service like Netflix has to make licensing deals with different organisations in each country if they want to offer their services there, which is why the catalogues are quite different from country to country. Some countries like Germany have very powerful organisations (GEMA) that represent most professional artists, studios and labels, making them very tough negotiating parties. It’s a mess at this point and it will be a serious challenge to change this. The only way to do is by breaking up or taking away the power these organisations have and that will not be an easy thing to do.

Ah, the Good old Days (I'm talking last millenium here) when the internet was still wild and free, and nobody knew that you were a dog ...

While ... but there is [url=https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/8068370944/h89F515D9/]also this.

So funny and sad at the same time.

I really hope he is successful with this. Then GOG would HAVE to go back on their new regional blocking!

When I posted this report I thought GOGers in Germany would be all over it, are you all just hanging out in your new forum?

Well, divide et impera, ain't it? Well at least you can count one german GOGer in here. Just played a session of Commandos, which I fortunately bought before this whole shenanigans. I really do hope this motion will be successful. The EU did some good at least with roaming charges in the past.