Boost GDP by £260bn?
That's an awful lot of p0rn.
Seemingly frustrated at not being able to stream films in his Belgian hotel room, Business Secretary Vince Cable is calling for an "online single market" to address the weighty issue of making UK Netflix content accessible across the EU. Without unfair discrimination all online streaming services such as Netflix should be …
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"I'm not going to faff around with a VPN, just so I can get a bit of BBC. Give me "legal" access to it for a couple of quid and I'll be happy."
Yeah, that ain't gonna happen any time soon. It's a licensing problem, particularly for things like music. The BBC has carte blanche to use any music it wants for its programmes, with a compulsory licence on artists. Move outside broadcast signals in the UK and they have no such rights. It's why there is a Top Gear UK, not available to buy, and a Top Gear everywhere else, for example: they have no rights to the music they use. Clearly the BBC would love to sell Top Gear on DVD, but the licensing restrictions mean they cannot.
As an expat who would like the iPlayer, I feel it worth pointing out that my local cable TV provider carries pretty much the full set of BBC, ITV and Channel 4 TV channels, as broadcast in Blighty. If I can pay a modest monthly subscription fee to get the TV channels to my home on cable, how come I can't do the same thing to get them off the iPlayer?
"Isn't that just the sort of handicap that a common market would try to cure?"
Yes in theory. What would have to happen though is that the BBC couldn't possibly be given worldwide rights to do whatever it wanted though, so the BBC would in fact lose its forced licence and have to buy all its rights the same as everyone else. That might be considered good or not, depending on where you stand, but either BBC programmes would be worse or the licence fee would go up.
The main - almost exclusive drive to piracy is not people wanting stuff for free. It's people wanting stuff that is being artificially siloed away from them.
I'd pay £10, £15 a month if it was to a single gateway, and I could watch the content I knew was available.
Currently it's TV licence, £70/months to Virgin (and that's being reviewed), plus Amazon instants, plus netflix, etc etc.
I know somebody who pays for a full sky subscription, but prefers to download because there are no adverts and there's no waiting for foreign releases ( admittedly improved recently with some programmes simulcasting ). The UX for the-media-centre-formally-know-as-XBMC is so much better than Sky for the box-set type use-case too.
They tried Netflix, would be happy to pay for it too, but it doesn't have enough content.
Almost all of what I download I could have accessed for "free" as a combination of my various packages. Except I prefer no adverts, and (looking at you iPlayer) I prefer it to watch when *I* want to (no "try again later) and also I prefer to watch it all the way through in one go. Not have it stall, buffer, and then tell me (you guessed it !) to "try again later".
Is it a Virgin issue ? A BBC one ? Who knows ? certainly not - wait for it - Virgin and the BBC.
So unless I explicitly set my TiVo to record it (because I don't trust iPlayer - go figure), it's hello NZBs here I come. On my Virgin broadband. Which rocks - seriously !
"So unless I explicitly set my TiVo to record it (because I don't trust iPlayer - go figure), it's hello NZBs here I come. On my Virgin broadband. Which rocks - seriously !"
I do find it slightly odd that watching a stream from iPlayer in real time can buffer, stutter and even stop completely and yet I can use Get_iplayer to "stream" it straight to a file on the hard disk way, way faster with no pauses in the download. And yes, VM BB rocks!
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The EU has been arguing for this for a while now - and as an ex-pat, I would love to be able to get original soundtrack movies on Amazon Prime, for example - yet the UK has been against further integration and discussing pulling out of the EU... Maybe the UK politicians should make up their minds.
I'm tired of UK netflix having so much less than USA. Surely streaming should give everyone the same stuff.
You know that. I know that. The entire general public knows that. The studios, for some reason, don't.
Give everyone in the world access to the same content for a reasonable fee and piracy will pretty much disappear.
For example - my wife and I have long enjoyed The Amazing Race (you may keep your opinions on that to yourself). But there is NO way to watch it legally in the UK. No channel carries it and their online service won't allow anyone from outside the US to watch it. The ONLY option I have is to download it. I am happy to pay. I am willing to pay. But nobody will take my money.
In the meantime the Netflix problem is solved with Hola, or with Unblock-US which works on any device.
"I'm tired of UK netflix having so much less than USA....." Certain services are tied to location licenses, some will not work if the software detects that you are not where your license says you are entitled to be. But, if you are willing to pay for an US Netflix subscription, it then becomes a matter of fooling your system into thinking it is in the US. Now, I'm not encouraging any illegal/piracy activity (CYA statement), but a friend bought a Roku in the States last year and was annoyed in didn't work in the UK as well as it did in the US. He found he could fool the Roku with a paid-for DNS service called Unlocator (http://vpnfreedom.com/roku/how-to-use-the-roku-box-outside-the-us/), and he told me he now enjoys full US Netflix streaming wherever he can get the bandwidth. He makes sure he doesn't use the service for anything other than streaming (no work material, email or other coms).
So... which clause, precisely, of which copyright act in which country, gives the rights-holder the right to restrict where their content can be accessed?
I can tell you the answer to that, at least as it applies in US, British, EU and Canadian law: there is no such right. It's been basically engineered into the law by DRM.
Copyright gives you the right to limit copying, distribution, performance and display of, and derivation from, your work. Nothing was ever intended to give you the right to say "this book can only be read if you're in Australia", or "this music can only be listened to on Sony headphones". Those are extensions to copyright, which take away rights from consumers, and we shouldn't stand for it.
my view fwiw: if you pay a monthly fee for access to content, you get access to that content in that month. If it's sold as online access to content, it needs to be online access to content - if you have Internet access, you get the content, or you get the money back for the period when you couldn't access it for any non-technical reason - got to allow for ISP screw-ups or the occasional "JCB vs fibre" contest, etc.
It's eminently practical and easily achieved using existing laws.
Try telling the Germans that you can only use French cars in France and see how far you get with the Eu commision.
If you want to use the single market to pay corporation tax in Ireland, VAT in Luxemburg and not have to apply for a business visa to visit each customer then you also don't get to discriminate by country
As an ex-pat living in Germany, I can't buy all the available UK music online from Google Play Music and iTunes. If I were to buy it from iTunes UK in Germany, it would be illegal. Likewise music from German bands I like can't be bought by friends in the UK, unless they went to the German store.
Amazon blocks you trying to buy MP3s in the UK store for music I can't even get here. I have an Amazon Prime subscription enabling me to watch lots of movies and series in German. A handful of "OV" (original version) films are available in English. Glad I learned German. The last series of "Not Going Out"? No chance.
Changes to the legislation is, in my opinion, way overdue. I should be able to make use of my Amazon Prime subscription when I'm elsewhere in the EU on holiday, but I can't legally do this. Well, I can download them to my Kindle Fire and turn off the Internet connection, but that's not the point. It needs planning in advance.
To be fair, the issue is related to TV rights being sold to local broadcasters. Comedy Central UK has paid for the rights to exclusively broadcast Friends in the UK, this is why it's not available on Netflix in the UK. It's a difficult issue to resolve without tearing down the basis of all TV broadcasting rights sales.
"Comedy Central UK has paid for the rights to exclusively broadcast Friends in the UK, this is why it's not available on Netflix in the UK."
I wonder how the contract is actually worded? Netflix not being a broadcaster and all that. No doubt the lawyers have it all sewn up. Yet you can still buy or rent the Friends DVDs, which is not all that different to storing your copy on a Netflix server to watch when and where you want to. Oh, the fun we could have in a court! ;-)