Good, I hope they hammer Apple. I moved country and lost around 2/3rd of my TV and Film library, box sets partially complete, films disappeared, TV shows 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.
It is not Apple. It is the actual owners of the media. The movie and music industry. They decide where a (version of a) movie or even a single song is available.
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 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.
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?
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…)
It very much is an Apple problem because I purchased my stuff from them and not from anyone else. The buck has to stop there.
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.
> [...] I just want post-purchase shenanigans to stop.
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.]
So here's the thing - the law isn't the problem - because you have no idea in advance how each individual piece of media, film, song, whatever, will be treated depending upon your own circumstances. And this actually changes from time to time.
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 story could just as easily be about content licensed through Google or Microsoft, no? But Apple has the most popular streaming service outside of the EU, so Apple is the one that people talk about.
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.
I am reminded of the EU push against DRM encumbered music nearly two decades ago.
> 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.
> My question is, "where does the requirement that content be licensed in only one country" contractually originate?
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 don't understand the complaint. The article says:
> 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.
> Why would you care that you can't get the Italian app "storefront" because you're French?
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.
But surely a transport app will make itself available to the whole EU because it wants to be available to tourists.
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?
Essentially, if you legally bought something in member state A, it has to remain being accessible if you move to another member state unless there's very specific regulatory limitations (i.e. not something the vendor can decide on, pretty much).
Considerable part of the push with Digital Single Market is that it should be, well, single market.
Ok that makes sense, I figured it had to be something like that. They couldn’t possibly think they could legislate a single world market. As nice as that may be.
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?
The correct solution, as unpleasant as it sounds, is to determine which country can afford the highest price on a given product and lock the price at that point for the entire EU. So. whatever Switzerland can afford is what the rest of the EU pays for things.
Good, I hope they hammer Apple. I moved country and lost around 2/3rd of my TV and Film library, box sets partially complete, films disappeared, TV shows 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.
It is not Apple. It is the actual owners of the media. The movie and music industry. They decide where a (version of a) movie or even a single song is available.
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.
> The EU cannot fix this
Of course it can. Ban country-specific licensing arrangements in the EU.
Within the EU. Yup. Outside not so much.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
The real problem is that national media regulators would have to give up sovereignty for this to work, which they never will.
They wouldn't be asked. The EU can legislate in the name of a common market and any law or regulation that doesn't conform can be challenged.
> EU can legislate in the name of a common market and any law or regulation that doesn't conform can be challenged
Sure. I'm saying politically it's DOA.
> They decide where a (version of a) movie or even a single song is available.
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?
Well... kind of.
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.
>They decide where a (version of a) movie or even a single song is available.
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.
Netflix would like a word
They're probably already on the EU's list for looking at as well.
The EU should bring Netflix into compliance as well.
> The EU cannot fix this
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?
I feel for you but this isn’t an Apple problem
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…)
It very much is an Apple problem because I purchased my stuff from them and not from anyone else. The buck has to stop there.
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 just want post-purchase shenanigans to stop.
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.]
So here's the thing - the law isn't the problem - because you have no idea in advance how each individual piece of media, film, song, whatever, will be treated depending upon your own circumstances. And this actually changes from time to time.
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.
> It's the blaming of Apple that we are finding problematic.
I know. As you guys do in absolutely every thread vaguely critical of Apple, without exception, no matter the topic.
This story could just as easily be about content licensed through Google or Microsoft, no? But Apple has the most popular streaming service outside of the EU, so Apple is the one that people talk about.
You never actually owned any of that. This is a perfect example of why downloading and storing locally is the way to go.
This is part of why I pirate stuff.
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.
I am reminded of the EU push against DRM encumbered music nearly two decades ago.
> 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?
> 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.
I guess the solution is the same as it was two decades ago for music.
Force the rights holders to only sell their digital content DRM-free.
> 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.
That won’t be an issue once the law has been adopted by the EU parliament.
Isn't regulatory harmonization (one of) the points of the EU?
> My question is, "where does the requirement that content be licensed in only one country" contractually originate?
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 don't understand the complaint. The article says:
> 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.
> Why would you care that you can't get the Italian app "storefront" because you're French?
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.
But surely a transport app will make itself available to the whole EU because it wants to be available to tourists.
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?
This would be like punishing Apple users for relocating from California to New York. Crazy.
So how exactly would this work?
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?
Essentially, if you legally bought something in member state A, it has to remain being accessible if you move to another member state unless there's very specific regulatory limitations (i.e. not something the vendor can decide on, pretty much).
Considerable part of the push with Digital Single Market is that it should be, well, single market.
OK. It’s good to get confirmation on that.
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.
It’s meant to be the latter, only between member states.
Ok that makes sense, I figured it had to be something like that. They couldn’t possibly think they could legislate a single world market. As nice as that may be.
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?
I used to work for Apple so can add some colour.
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.
Thanks.
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?
As I understand geo-locking is done for Mainland China accounts as well, so nothing new.
As I understand geo-locking isn’t done when in New Jersey, compared to Oklahoma, so lots of new
The correct solution, as unpleasant as it sounds, is to determine which country can afford the highest price on a given product and lock the price at that point for the entire EU. So. whatever Switzerland can afford is what the rest of the EU pays for things.
Switzerland is not part of the EU nor part of the single market.
Why would that be a good solution, let alone the "correct" one?
Great, this would of course mean prices rising for the entire rest of Europe. Why would that be the "correct" solution?
This is how it works in the us and why there is only one store. Can't have your cake and eat it too.
Is it based on the most expensive one? Or is it an average of what the whole nation can afford?
I highly doubt prices in the USA are set by the standard of what Bay Area or NYC residents can pay.
Exponential sanctions, and blanket ban for non-compliance.
Detain any executives on-sight as well.
Big corpo cannot be allowed to pretend they are above government.