EU irate about geo-locked Apple IDs The European Union has demanded more platform changes from Apple – this time accusing it of violating anti-geoblocking rules in several of its media services. The European Commission announced today that a joint investigation between authorities in Belgium, Germany and Ireland determined Apple may be violating the EU's geo- …
"Ever try to change your account's registered country? It's nigh impossible"
Rubbish. It's easy to change the registered country; I've done it several times moving across various European countries over the last 15 years.
The issue is not that it's difficult to re-register, it's that you can't take your content with you. That's a problem and potentially in conflict with EU rules, but it's a completely separate issue.
One could indeed. Or from Apple's perspective, you die in one country and are reincarnated in another - with all your memories intact, but no earthly possessions.
Sidenote: downvoted by 6 people (so far) who either:
(a) have no experience of re-registering IDs and believe it's some kind of mystical art;
(b) are somehow confused with creating a new account vs re-registering, or;
(c) believe I'm somehow defending Apple.
I'm not defending Apple here; in fact their dodgy practices have cost me quite a lot of money over the years rebuying content, so I think they're thoroughly in the wrong. I'm criticizing a poorly researched and inaccurate headline. By all means bash Apple, but do it for the right reasons.
Sometimes you have no choice. If you've moved country, there are certain digital apps that you need to have, e.g. government and banking. These are only available in the App Store for your new country, so you therefore have to either create a new ID, or transfer your old one. Both options mean losing access to your previously purchased content.
Thus if you still want it (and you still value the ecosystem you signed up to), you have no choice but to buy it again. It's not about being gullible (which implies you were too naive to know what's going on), it's about being effectively blackmailed by a corporation that knows it's got you by the balls.
Your point about "no one should ever buy 'digital' content" is just stupid. I'm not going to engage with it.
"Both options mean losing access to your previously purchased content."
And yet, people keep buying "content", or rather, renting it. It's like with Amazon. If you return too many things or do something they don't like, they can cancel your account which can make all of your content to poof. Eggs and baskets.
I stay away from renting media that's being marketed in a way that infers ownership (of a license). I've seen many times where people have had something on a device that gets remotely yanked when the publisher and the content provider have an issue with licensing. I'm an old fart that really likes that once I have the CD/DVD in my collection, they'd have to come and take it away from me. They can't change the license terms at some future date and tell me I have to send the media back.
There's so many ways to procure things today outside the approved methods that removes the hooks that "buying" things via the legal route is more frustrating. Perhaps this is why media companies have come to embrace virtual delivery. With no tangible media, they have more control. At first they thought digital copies would be too easy to copy, but all of the DRM they've tried to use has wound up compromised anyway. Now they can give the legitimate buyers a proper spanking to keep them inline when they start getting uppity.
> If you've moved country, there are certain digital apps that you need to have, e.g. government and banking.
Not need.
Possibly a convenience, but no one can absolutely mandate the use of "an app" unless and until they have made it available on every single computing platform out there, including (for example) UBPorts on my Volla phone, and have made smartphone usage mandatory for all adults. My aging mother can't get on with a smartphone, yet somehow benefits from both banking and government services in an EU country.
-A.
"I'm pretty sure that fighting "needless" bureaucracy (whatever that is) and having every government interaction take 100 times longer than "necessary" (whatever that means) have absolutely nothing to do with use, or otherwise, of any kind of app."
You can be 'pretty sure', but you'd be wrong. Try living in France, the Netherlands, Italy or Denmark. I've lived in all of them, and in each country there is a conscious shift to interfacing with the great unwashed primarily through apps for healthcare, banking, council and government. You don't "have" to use the apps, but your life becomes an order of magnitude more complex if you don't. Especially as an expat.
And you know full well what "needless" bureaucracy is, and what "necessary" means in this context. Facetiousness is unbecoming.
"Especially as an expat."
There's your problem right there. You've explicitly declared yourself as not intending to stay and tied back to "the mother country"
Speaking as an antopidean, the worst asshats I ever had to deal with on a day-to-day basis described themselves as "expats" and actual honest immigrants hated them more than the locals did
I have, and had, no intention of staying in any of the countries I mentioned. My work required me to remain for a period of not less than 2 years in order to build up enough knowledge of the business processes in each region, after which I moved on when the company said it was time.
But I digress. My motivation of being an expat is irrelevant to any point being made in this article or comment thread.
> Try living in France
I do.
> there is a conscious shift to interfacing with the unwashed primarily through apps for healthcare, banking, council and government. You don't "have" to use the apps, but your life becomes an order of magnitude more complex if you don't. Especially as an expat.
Haven't noticed that, and I don't know what you mean by "especially as an expat".
> And you know full well what "needless" bureaucracy is, and what "necessary" means in this context. Facetiousness is unbecoming.
No idea what your're talking about. No one who knows me has ever accused me of being facetious.
-A.
That is exactly the point of the EU complaint. the fact is that Apple doesn’t (or didn’t) allow purchased content to move with an Apple ID when registering it in another country, but “why” they do this is a very good question. And clearly one to which the EU didn’t get a satisfactory answer.
Imagine if Apple tried playing that game in the US, treating each State as a separate and sovereign entity with no Federalism of any kind taken into account and tied your Apple ID and content into the State you first registered in. So why would Apple think, from the perspective of trade, the EU would be any different?
You CHOSE to buy into the lie, and when people have been conned, it's very hard for them to ever accept that they've been conned. They will come up with a plethora of ridiculous excuses to justify their foolishness and/or refuse to answer it by effectively sticking their fingers in their ears and going 'lalalalalalalalalalala, I can't hear you'
I await the next ridiculous attempt to justify your foolishness.
Also, please be aware that I'm calling your repeated defence and attempts to justify this whole subject foolish... not you as an entire human being. I'm sure you have some ok qualities too, you just don't present them to the world on here.
"Also, please be aware that I'm calling your repeated defence and attempts to justify this whole subject foolish..."
Where have I done this? In fact I've said quite the opposite: several times.
"...it's about being effectively blackmailed by a corporation that knows it's got you by the balls"
"...even if I vigorously disagree with some of their specific policies."
I managed to switch my country on my ipad by simply ditching the old ID. I don’t really use the app/apple store for anythIng as I really just browse the net on my tablet. So there wasn’t any digital content to lose by doing that. The reason I switched to the USA, which I did whilst in the USA was because I needed the Comcast app which you can’t download outside of the US. Oh and a VPN so that I can view the TV we’re paying for in the USA whilst actually in the UK.
The only problem I had was I couldn’t update Firefox (and yes I know it isn’t really Firefox) which I downloaded on the old ID. I worked out I just had to delete that app and reinstall it again on the new ID to be able to update it.
” Reply Icon
I managed to switch my country on my ipad by simply ditching the old ID.“
Of course you can do this; but you can’t take all your purchased digital content with you. If you don’t have any then there’s no issue, but if you’ve built up (for example) a library of films, it can be a pain in the ass.
"in fact their dodgy practices have cost me quite a lot of money over the years rebuying content, so I think they're thoroughly in the wrong"
And yet you keep rewarding their efforts by a direct monetary contribution every time it affects you to the world's most profitable company.
In a way, that is an Apple defense, whether you can see that or not.
"In a way, that is an Apple defense, whether you can see that or not."
I place enough value on the Apple ecosystem as a whole to continue to purchase, even if I vigorously disagree with some of their specific policies. Doesn't mean I'm defending that specific policy.
It really annoys me when my wife parks the car with the tyres right up against the kerb. It's expensive and unnecessary. I can and do criticise her for doing it again and again, but on the whole I want to stay married to her.
I have the impression that your downvoters either never moved or do not value the overall benefits of the Apple ecosystem and its hardware.
And yes, there are enough of them to make it worthwhile but it's 100% dependent on what your needs are and, to a degree, if you're willing to pay for it and if you want to go along with all of it.
I'm not buying every new iPhone or new Macbook (the latter only gets an update next year because the existing one is the last Intel and I deem 7 years a decent time to write off a machine), I buy what suits my need and, for instance, there's nothing about an iPhone 16 that I personally find worth spending the money on.
They're really not, and it really is. Keep talking though; you're funny.
Good luck with that.
Google knows where I live. My "home" address is there, and at some point it has GPSed to know where my router's SSID is located.
Maybe some day they'll tell me the weather forecast for where I actually live instead of some random place within ~50km of here based upon...I dunno, virtual runes?
Your take is quite frankly imho a bit stupid:
Being required to re-register is very different from CHANGING your registered country. You can't just tell Apple: Hey, I live over here now and the accounts registered country just changes. Registering maybe achieves a similar end goal, but the account doesn't just change, you're basically creating an entirely new account in the new country, it just happens to have the same username/ID.
So you're basically saying what the article is describing IS nigh impossible, but why would you bother because you can throw away everything that's in your account and create a new one that happens to have the same ID, isn't that great?
That's not it's name. Everyone keeps talking about Schrödinger's Cat. They keep performing God awful experiments on it and locking it up in scary boxes. But no one seems to care what Schrödinger's cat's name actually was. I have it on good authority that 1) it's a girl, 2) her name was "Flauschige Puffz" (Fluffy Puffs in modern), 3) she wasn't simultaneously dead and alive, but well alive. Schrödinger wasn't all that bright and forgot to properly check the box for holes. Fluffy Puffs squeezed out through a small one and fed up with all the bizarre experimentation, went to live next door with Mrs Liuthold.
Bloody carelessness. Just like that other one, Frankenstein's Monster. He was called "Herbert".
"I'm fairly certain that the cat's name was "Bernice","
Cats nearly always have multiple names depending on their "mood of the day".
One of my favorite cats was Mr Paws, or Mutant, or Ogre, or "Stop that!" He was all black and had 26 toes (super-polydactal). A big boy that really liked to cuddle and climb under covers in the winter. Decibelle was very vocal but could never teach me her real name. Not that I'd have a chance of pronouncing it correctly.
To me, the only real benefits are that you keep your Apple Family intact, and any smart functionality you have still works e.g. Apple Home. In my last transfer I somehow ended up keeping music credits on the account as well, but I don't think this is standard practice.
Some people are daft…
It would seem you are totally happy with the way things are currently, happy to repurchase content you already have etc. and are so happy you are rubbishing proposals that would make you life much simpler and remove the need to repurchase stuff…
...corporate apologists and will accept any form of treatment as long as it comes from Apple?
...so brainwashed of Apple's "perfection" that they believe FruitCo can do no wrong, even when they themselves have had to re-pay for previously-purchased items?
...so believing in Apple that any policy, even one that hurts them financially, is a good one?
...can't see a double-standard of lock-in because it comes associated with their favorite products??
We can continue on this theme for a while ^_^
"Rubbish. It's easy to change the registered country; I've done it several times moving across various European countries over the last 15 years."
"The issue is not that it's difficult to re-register, it's that you can't take your content with you."
"Thus if you still want it (and you still value the ecosystem you signed up to), you have no choice but to buy it again."
You're Double Welcome
On the one hand I'm with you when it comes to the pain in the proverbial of changing registered country, but the 'having to buy again' thing is new to me. All music is in unlocked MP3s (at least mine is) because Apple removed any locking years ago, and there are only a few apps that are tied to countries.
So what do you need to buy again? Genuinely curious.
In my case, films.
That said, it was a couple of years ago now: and as far as I can tell from Apple’s current transfer conditions, you can now simply redownload any purchased films at no cost as long as the studio hasn’t placed a restriction on it.
So maybe they’ve fixed the issue now, and this whole EU demand is without merit anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ; won’t know for sure until I move again.
Hey now, if Apple says "do the thing you already did, again, and pay us for it, again", you DO it, and you PAY them and you arre HAPPY about it.
So happy in fact you have to jump into a newspaper comments section to distract yourself from thinking about it too hard.
are so happy you are rubbishing proposals that would make you life much simpler
So far I have not seen any actual sane or useful proposals. Only opinions and suggestions of people that appear not to be using any Apple products.
You can change country but it's a royal pain, and shows (IMHO) that Apple really ought to stop this kowtowing to especially the MPAA (because that's the only reason I can see why they started this daft idea and went further than region by literally making a country lockup). Ditto for Netflix - that I live in country X doesn't mean I welcome subtitles in that language for English movies - I have damaged hearing so sometimes I just need it to follow the movie but no, Netflix strips the original subtitles.
The best argument for ending this idiocy is that it actually costs them money. There are some apps I'd love to buy, but the whole nation lock got on my nerves. I have moved now and will probably stay in this country, but not looking forward to changing the country of residence in the shop - until now I got by by getting some voucher numbers sent over from where I used to live by friends (proving that the lock isn't super effective anyway).
"happy to repurchase content you already have etc"
The Music Industry has been relying on this since CDs came along
More specifically:
1: Single sales fell off a cliff during the 1970s and by 1980 the ratio was something like 100 album sales for every single sold
2: Album sales by 1984 were about 30% of what they'd been in 1974 and cassettes accounted for 75% of all sales
3: Nearly ALL CD sales were people repurchasing material they already had in the new format
4: By 1993 this massive sales spurt had dried up and the music industry was reeling
Along came Napster. It hardly affected sales (in fact if anything it increased them) but it was a convenient Blame Touchstone to obtain more stringent copyright laws
The value of the entertainment industry is small, but it's proven to be a poison pill for companies which have attempted to buy into it to head off copyright litigation (Eg: Sony)
At various points in the past, Google or various telcos could have purchased the yappy little media companies with pocket change from down the back of the sofa, yet chose not to
The other paradox is that whilst the entertainment industry is small, its influence on government legislation is vastly disproportionate to its importance - hence we have the Mouse laws which have resulted in copyright/patents becoming an ENCUMBERANCE on advancement rather than an inducement to it
Now, even worse, we have conflation of trade secrets and copyrights. The whole point of a copyright was that if you had a trade secret that leaked, there was no protection. Now we have copyrights protected by secrets (DRM)
Companies should be restricted to using one or the other, not both
You are conflating creating a new account with changing the country in an existing account.
Think of it like a database. Your account id points to the row in the table that stores your country and user id. You're suggesting we set up a new row, with a new country, and copy the userId to the new row (and presumably tidy up the original row). What other people are suggesting is that you shouldn't have to create a new row, you should be able to update the original row to have your new country without making any other changes.
Is that clear enough?
This also helps e plain why the vendors will resist. They have a database for US users physically located in the US and a second database for EU users located in the EU (GDPR).
So changing your country means your account details need to be transferred…
Or defending the operators, just noting the solution may not be as straight-forward as it may first seem.
So your post has inspired me to look at what you have to do to change the registered country for an Apple account on Apple's support website:
Change your Apple Account country or region
I won't copy and paste it as it's too long.
This is some kind of joke, right? Or perhaps it was designed by people who never set foot outside of Apple Park so they don't have this problem?
Another case of goto fail; for Apple.
If you want to leave the house:
- Make sure you have finished any drinks, meals etc that you prepared.
- Stand up from the couch, chair or wherever you're sitting.
- Ensure you have a payment method, ID and other documentation you might need at your destination.
- Ensure you have keys, or another method of re-entering your house when you wish to return.
- Make sure the path to your door is clear of obstacles; you can either remove these obstacles yourself, or wait for somebody else to move them.
- Start walking toward your chosen exit point, making sure to avoid any other obstacles.
- Stop to put on your outside shoes.
- Open the door, step outside, close and lock the door.
That's an 8-step process.
Apple's process is 6 steps.
I'm not sure why you chose that comparison. The complexity of a process is not the number of steps, but the sum of the complexities of those steps. A two step process of 1) deactivate the safety systems on the nuclear reactor, manually preventing anything from going wrong and 2) rearrange the parts so it works on a different type of fuel is a lot more complex than a forty-step process for cooking instructions where a single step might read "remove bag of flour from cupboard" and the next one "place it onto a work surface". We're not going to get anywhere by counting list items.
Nor are we going to get anywhere by debating about the complexity of pushing the "change country" button. The EU's complaint is not about the user interface and how hard or easy it is to find that option. It is about other problems, for example the problems of what happened to the stuff you had in your previous country, which seems to divide itself into two big categories: 1) you have to buy it again and 2) you can't even buy it again. That, of course, is merely one list item. You've repeatedly suggested that you disagree with Apple's choices, so the entire debate in this thread seems a little weird. Having discussed with you before, I know you tend to defend Apple on most things, but since you disagree with them on this one, what is the objection you are raising?
”what is the objection you are raising?”
Simply that the post I responded to by Dan 55 said; ” I won't copy and paste [Apple’s 6-step procedure] as it's too long. This is some kind of joke, right?“
My reply was pointing out the nonsense here that you can make any simple process look complicated if you write it out step by step; the number of steps doesn’t inherently make it a ‘difficult’ process.
Which incidentally is the exact point you are making.
Or it was literal, pasting the fifteen-step process would be kind of ridiculous because anyone who cares would click the link. And yes, it's fifteen. The six points are just what you do before switching your country, and the process on an IOS device involves nine more steps, although all of those are pretty simple steps. So yes, I'd rather not have to find fifteen steps copied and pasted in here when it's irrelevant to everything else.
Agree they don't need to be posted, and this is very much heading off on a tangent now so I won't continue debating the point.
On the whole defending vs criticising Apple thing, it's true that all things considered, the Apple ecosystem is more valuable to me than the competing alternatives. They are however far from perfect, and unlike a true fanboi I do call them out on some of their shittier decisions. Same with the journalism here; on the whole I think it's an excellent website, but the anti-Apple bias is palpable and occasionally outright childish.
I do like how step one is to "spend your remaining Apple Account balance. No option to just refund it back to your registered credit/debit card? Really? Is that too hard? Or are they so desperate for your money you have to spend your Apple pre-paid credit on something they are about to delete from your device anyway when you change "region or country"?
They make gazillions, so they can presently get away with it.
Until someone files a complaint, but that's the moment someone will point to the Terms and observe that in order to use the ecosystem you agreed with it.
I keep my exposure relatively low in that respect. I have very little Apple-only data - all music is unlocked MP3 although there's now some Cloud thing working in Music which I need to get the detail of because I intensely dislike Cloudy things that I do not control (the key reason I don't have anything from Microsoft and Adobe on my system) so I will start asking for answers in a manner they cannot ignore.
It seems everyone wants us to move to Cloudy stuff, but nobody wants to accept responsibility for the consequences - not going there.
Call me old fashioned or stubborn (and you'd be right both times :) ), but no.
> the EC noted in its press release, prohibits discrimination based on nationality, residence, or place of establishment when a citizen of a member state wants to buy goods or services from a vendor located in a different member state.
Every bloody industry in the EU does this. It's endemic.
Ever had the 'Sorry we don't ship to [insert country X here]' message when trying to buy something?
It is common with US based sites (like this one perhaps??????)
As for CRAPPLE not wanting to transfer stuff from country A to country B, there is a danger of breaking local laws if the transfer something that is illegal in the destination. Then there is the issue of copyright and all that crap.
The whole thing is a minefield and we the users are trying to cross it in the dark. How the hell are we supposed to know what set of digital bits is illegal where we go travelling? Aren't there recommendations that travellers to the USofA take a clean phone/tablet/laptop with them just in case you fall foul of local laws, like Florida banning certain books and if they think (mistakenly) that you are trying to import an uncensored copy of 1984, Women in Love, Lady Chatterly etc etc etc, then they will throw you in jail and toss the key to the local alligator.
Personally, I hope Apple asks the EC for a clear guideline (aka lawyer proof) of what can be moved and what can't.
Because of copyright (out of Apple's control, in the majority of cases, they only have the rights to broadcast that movie/TV series in certain countries) not moving an Apple TV subscription, seems reasonable.
Come on EC, use this case to clarify the law. Then... throw the book at Apple (and the rest, like Netflix etc) and we will cheer.
> Personally, I hope Apple asks the EC for a clear guideline (aka lawyer proof) of what can be moved and what can't.
Given the important but subtle difference between the continent and the UK/US, Apple will still need to tread carefully, as the EU guidelines will be along the lines: only explicitly specified acts are permitted.
So expect Apple’s attempts to get around the directive to be slapped down, as the get around were not explicitly permitted.
There's a category difference between buying something from a foreign site and importing it into the EU, and buying something from another EU member, through the single market.
As for the "we don't ship to X", I have certainly experienced this, here in the UK, after we were dragged out of the EU's single market due to the vote of people like CJ (who I'm sure is likely to pop up any second to tell us all how the EU is somehow directly linked to Satan). I never experienced it prior to this point when buying anything from any EU country.
In a somewhat related matter, I have a sponsorship of an olive tree with a small cooperative in Spain, which includes receiving a couple of litres of oil each year. This year, the shipping cost from Spain to the UK went up from €5 to €45. They were very apologetic when they contacted me after charging the lower amount, explaining that they were incurring higher costs for shipping which they, quite reasonably, had to pass on to me. Another bonus there for the sake of "are sovrinty".
"Ever had the 'Sorry we don't ship to [insert country X here]' message when trying to buy something?"
As pointed out by someone else, since we left the EU, its a fucking nightmare.
I'm a one man shop that designs my own stuff to sell on a part time basis. I simply don't have the time and energy to deal with all the hundreds of shipping, custom fees and taxes PER ITEM I'd have to set up. This is the same for thousands of small businesses.
"there is a danger of breaking local laws if the transfer something that is illegal in the destination"
They may be so but it's irrelevant to this discussion. I could copy a bunch of things on to my phone and then walk across the border into Germany. It's my problem, not Samsung's. Furthermore if it is material that was legitimately purchased, why does anybody think it is acceptable for not only it to be removed because your location has changed, but your entire account?
"Then there is the issue of copyright and all that crap."
Convenient excuse. More likely it's a good wheeze to get you to repurchase content you've already paid for once.
"they only have the rights to broadcast that movie/TV series in certain countries"
That makes sense, yes. Netflix in France is in a kind of battle with Canal+ over who gets what films, so the list of what's new is highly country specific. Funny thing is, they just tell you either that they don't have X or that X isn't available in my location. They don't require that I essentially recreate my account, and that's where the problem lies here. Not in rights, not in who can do what where, but in the assholery of the proposed solution. Because, yeah, people in a bloc with freedom of movement would never exercise it, right?
"Florida is banning specific books in school libraries"
Well, that's not the EU and that's not a normal situation.
That being said, I notice that a book absolutely filled with violence and debauchery is not only permitted on those same libraries, it's the cause of most of this nonsense.
FWIW those flurryduh laws HAVE been used to ban the OT in libraries and the bans have been upheld
https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/the-holy-bible-returns-to-volusia-county-schools-shelves-after-temporary-removal
https://truthout.org/articles/florida-man-demands-ban-on-bible-in-schools-using-desantiss-own-law-against-him/
The result was a law change which should be trivially overturned on discrimination grounds
https://fortune.com/2024/04/16/ron-desantis-book-ban-bible-challenge-chaz-stevens-florida/
https://www.cfpublic.org/education/2024-11-11/florida-list-banned-books-schools
Because of copyright (out of Apple's control, in the majority of cases, they only have the rights to broadcast that movie/TV series in certain countries) not moving an Apple TV subscription, seems reasonable.
This is also a breach of the EU's geoblocking restrictions, and has been tested in court a few times - usually pubs or bars showing football matches that aren't available in the local country. I don't recall any cases where the bars/pubs have lost off the top of my head, but I do remember a couple where they won.
"As for CRAPPLE not wanting to transfer stuff from country A to country B, there is a danger of breaking local laws if the transfer something that is illegal in the destination. Then there is the issue of copyright and all that crap."
It you look at the licensing info on DVD/Bluray packaging and/or at the "scary" legal messages that typically appear at the end of a film then technically speaking if you were to relocate (move home) from the UK to, for example, USA then if your belongings included UK/EU purchased DVD/Bluray films then you might be committing a civil offence, with an appropriate fine, at your destination as those discs may not be licensed in your destination.
In part this is due to the way that often film distribution is divided up across the world between 2 or 3 distributors.
I did an experiment when I was still travelling for work.
I bought an official release on DVD and a pirated version - the legal version was actually hard to get as I was in Thailand, but the MPAA did get its pound of flesh.
Guess which one I was able to play when I got back home?
"I bought an official release on DVD and a pirated version - the legal version was actually hard to get as I was in Thailand, but the MPAA did get its pound of flesh.
Guess which one I was able to play when I got back home?"
Well Thailand is DVD region 3 whereas the UK (which I assume is home for you) is DVD region 2. As I mentioned earlier different distribution companies tend to handle films in different parts of the world, that's one of the reasons for DVD regions existing, so whichever distribution company handled that film for Thailand received a percentage of what you paid whereas whichever distribution company handled that film for the UK (or wherever you live) got nothing, so your own DVD player refusing to play the disc due to region coding is doing precisely what region coding is intended to achieve.
To be clear I'm not saying this is a "good thing", rather that that's just how it is.
"Well Thailand is DVD region 3 whereas the UK (which I assume is home for you) is DVD region 2"
Australia's ACCC declared DVD region coding to be an illegal restraint on trade in the 1990s and region-free players have been the norm there ever since
The interesting part is the lengths that companies will go to in order to put that genie back in the bottle. The UK attempted to have that decision invalidated as part of the AU-UK trade agreement
"In part this is due to the way that often film distribution is divided up across the world between 2 or 3 distributors."
Yup, the Global Copyright Cartels - headquartered in London and now falling into the firing line of a number of countries which see Brexit as an opportunity to destroy those 19th century mercantile divisions based on old empire boundaries
Google seems only allows you to alter your country of account registration once per year, but you can have multiple accounts in different countries on one phone, which rapidly gets rather convoluted if you move around a bit but sort of works.
Apart from the need to establish a jurisdiction for your agreement - and the convenience of filtering out of your view all of the region-specific apps you're never going to want - the main reason for geographic specificity is enforcing the boundaries of rights-licensing territories. This is something the EU keeps blowing hot and cold about - they can't seem to decide if geoblocking is anti-competitive or vital to protect minority cultures. A more consistent view about where the single market rules apply might be easier to implement and enforce.
Personal pet peeve with Google accounts (ignoring all the other godawful stuff) is that you can't change your email address and keep it linked to the same account.
Now, I know a lot of people go through their life keeping the same name they were born with, but many people (with a preponderance towards women) do change their name, potentially multiple times, and being trans - I'd rather not have to jump into a deadname account to access purchased content.
Odd, I distinctly remember changing my e-mail address some years ago from one at Yahoo! to one at Protonmail, and keeping the same Google account.
Perhaps it's due to some subsequent change? Or -my guess- maybe a benefit of NOT using Gmail when registering (yes, it's actually possible to create a Google account without using a @gmail address, it's just that 99% of users never bother to)... Or I may well be misunderstanding your problem with Google, in which case my apologies.
"yes, it's actually possible to create a Google account without using a @gmail address"
Why? I created my account with a Gmail address. It's about the only thing I ever use that Gmail for. My personal preferred address has changed a couple of times in the past decade, and I have several other accounts to keep things organised (and not disclose my personal account except to people I actually want to hear from). Since Google only knows the Gmail and the Gmail exists for Google... It's problem solved on that front.
What would be the pros and cons of turning the EU into an indivisible entity when it comes to rights management?
Obvious pro is that your eu country of residence, purchase or citizenship is irrelevant.
Would it make licensing more expensive? Dunno but there’s seems to be no obvious reason why licensing a highly-localised piece of content for the EU should be more expensive compared to a local licence, any interest overseas will mostly be limited to the diaspora.
And maybe content of international interest should be more expensive, why not.
My particular (Apple) beef is that my family all have various/multiple national affiliations, requiring various awkward workarounds to make things possible. Yet all members of a “family” must have accounts belonging to the same country.
> What would be the pros and cons of turning the EU into an indivisible entity when it comes to rights management.
Welcome to the Single Market, DVD region blocking already operates like this.
This, Apple’s geo-locking on nation state rather than economic block, nicely shows that it wasn’t necessarily “the EU” that was being slow etc., but the businesses that want to trade in the EU.
The EU, like China, are showing that they are big enough to kick multi-nationals were it hurts. We can expect other major markets eg. India, to also start getting more assertive.
It will be interesting to see if the EU will fully support grey imports, so you could purchase a Japanese market device (so get a full Japanese UI) and register it in the EU with full access to both EU and Japanese app and music stores/services.
DVD region blocking is extremely annoying and should be illegal.
I live in France. If I go to the UK and buy a physical DVD, what right do companies have to refuse me the right to play it in France ?
I BOUGHT THE FUCKING DVD.
Let me play it where I want, or I'll just find a pirate copy and play that.
"I live in France. If I go to the UK and buy a physical DVD, what right do companies have to refuse me the right to play it in France ?"
There are only 9 DVD region codes. The UK and France (and the rest of the EU) have always been in the same DVD region code 2, so your example is wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code
"I BOUGHT THE FUCKING DVD."
You bought the physical DVD disc, however if you check the legalese (hidden on a microdot somewhere on the packaging) you *licensed* the content on the DVD. It's a crap situation but that's the way it is.
"You bought the physical DVD disc, however if you check the legalese (hidden on a microdot somewhere on the packaging) you *licensed* the content on the DVD."
- I am pretty sure that a contract of which one party is completely unaware is not legally valid. If you don't know about the legalese, or even could plausibly claim not to know about it, or even know about it but did not explicitly and positively agree to be bound by it, then it's not worth the microdot it's written on.
I don't think it's a contract, but IANAL.
What you're looking at is, I think, copyright law, and you don't need mutual agreement on that for it to work. The owner of the copyright has the right to prescribe how the contents is being used, be it books, film, music, technically even you when you write an email but good luck enforcing that.
Also pretending that this has not been repeatedly in the news (read: widely published cases as a scare tactic to keep the MPAA relevant) is not going to work either: "Ich habe es nicht gewußt" hasn't worked for years as a valid defense but streaming makes it a lot harder to keep things as contained as the MPAA and RIAA would like.
Maybe actually read about it instead of guessing?
It's worth educating yourself about copyright law because if it bites you, it bites hard - the people who make (a lot of) money off the concept don't play for peanuts, even if it is just to use you as an example.
"I am pretty sure that a contract of which one party is completely unaware is not legally valid. "
It's not a contract. It's copyright and the limitations that can be applied by the copyright owner to the use of the work.
By now, most people should realize that if they buy a DVD, they don't have the right to rip it and post it online. What they may not have looked into is what other things they are not allowed to do with the content such has public performance (for money or free doesn't matter). Things change over time so making a backup or making a copy in order to shift the media the content is on is not illegal. Selling that copy without including the original media that embodies the license isn't allowed.
Just because you didn't understand a EULA that you agreed to by clicking the box doesn't mean that a clause you thought meant something else doesn't apply in the way it's interpreted by courts.
Even if you don't intend to become a blood sucking lawyer, studying law is a good idea. Taylor Swift found out the hard way about Copyright when somebody she really doesn't like wound up owning the rights to her early work as she had signed her rights away for money on them. Maybe she understood she was selling her claims to the works, but perhaps didn't understand what that might mean in future. Paul McCartney has also had to put in a lot of work and money to regain control of things he wrote for the Beatles.
This is already the case for many things, for example paid streaming services: subscribe to Sky in one country and you can watch still watch it in another (EU) country. Though it did take a court case to establish this.
Apple, as usual, seems to mix arrogange with technical incompetence – there is a degree of inviolability with accounts that mean that you can't change the e-mail address, so I have at least two ghost accounts that I can neither access nor delete, even though I still have the e-mail address. And the various stores still seem to have the same antiquated code base that they had twenty years ago; it rivals that of airline companies for inflexibility. But, as long as they keep selling gadgets they don't think they need to care.
That’s not quite the same thing. Currently, a French Sky subscription will not give you access to German Sky content.
A film purchased in one country may not work if the user account is transferred to another country.
For true freedom of movement/services/goods, the EU would have to be treated in the same way as a single country is treated today. A British subscription doesn’t care what county you are in, and an EU subscription shouldn’t care what EU country you are in.
(It would also be nicer if the UK were part of the EU but I think that has been discussed elsewhere.)
Sure, but a French Sky subscription will give you access to French content in Germany.
Not in my experience. Even pre-Brexit you couldn't subscribe to French TV from any country outside France, nor could you even get a free card for the French equivalent of "Freeview" if you couldn't give a French address for shipping. The same was true in reverse, if Sky UK found that you were in France, your subscription was cancelled.
The subscriptions are cross-border. But there may be strings attached, similar to roamings. For example, for a while it became common for pubs to show football matches from the satellite services of other countries. This was perfectlly legal at the time, and if fact Sky started only with a licence for Luxemburg, but it went to court and the Premier League won on a technicality – I think it was the use of their copyright (logos, etc.) that could be restricted, not the football itself, but I could be wrong.
" I think it was the use of their copyright (logos, etc.) that could be restricted, not the football itself, but I could be wrong."
Logos would fall under Trademark so doubtful that those would be the issue.
It would be the football since a recording of that would fall under Copyright and that gives the creator/owner a bundle of rights which includes "performance". Performance in this case can mean where the programming is displayed and often there will be exclusive distribution rights sold to somebody in various markets for "re-broadcast". It's the "live" aspect that might be difficult. A copyright applies to a original creative work fixed in a tangible media. I expect the football is being recorded at the same time it's being shown live, but are the two activities simultaneous in a way that satisfies the requirements. I would assume it does, but I don't any live streaming so I've never had to look into it nor spent the money talking to my attorney about it.
"A film purchased in one country may not work if the user account is transferred to another country."
You mean a film *licensed* by you in one country, if you read the legalese small print you'll see you're not purchasing the film...
Even with CDs, DVDs, and Blurays you are purchasing said physical media BUT only licensing the content that is on the physical media (for use on that specific individual item of physical media which is why they won't replace damaged media for free).
For true freedom of movement/services/goods, the EU would have to be treated in the same way as a single country is treated today. A British subscription doesn’t care what county you are in, and an EU subscription shouldn’t care what EU country you are in.
The problem is that rights holders in non-EU countries don't care what EU law says. The US owner of rights to a TV show may want to sell the French broadcast rights to, say, Canal+ for $x million, and the same rights for Italian broadcasts to, say, Sky Italia, for another $x million, making $2x million in total. If Canal+ comes back & says "EU law doesn't allow that restriction, we have to be able to provide that broadcast to anyone in the single market who asks" the US rights holder can just say "OK, EU population is 7x that of France, you can have EU-wide rights for $7x million", which Canal+ would never accept.
Things obviously get tricky with the language issue. Arguably Canal+ would only require French-language rights, but there are many French speakers in the EU outside of France, and if English-language rights are considered the pool of potential viewers is even bigger, even in countries where English isn't an official language.
It's possible that streaming services will allow suppliers to charge based on actual subscriber numbers, but that's still far from easy to manage, so many non-EU rights holders won't see it as worth the effort when the current model works for them. The EU could just ban them, I suppose, but there might be a sizeable consumer backlash from the many people who don't travel & see the current system as OK. The EU might see this as an idealogical issue, but in purely practical, pragmatic, terms, how many people from the EU actually move countries often enough for it to be a problem for more than a minority of the 450m people in the EU?
> the US rights holder can just say "OK, EU population is 7x that of France, you can have EU-wide rights for $7x million", which Canal+ would never accept.
Quite apart from single market regulation, contracts work by negotiation and agreement. Canal+ is big enough to offer one or two fingers to such a stupid proposition.
-A.
Would it make licensing more expensive?
It would tend to unify prices - they'd fall in the likes of France and Germany and rise in some others. The alternative is that they don't licence it in the EU at all, and burying media for tax breaks only works if you don't licence it anywhere.
There's already case law about this, people could use French subscription satellite TV in the UK. (Don't know if Brexit changed that)
There was a lot of screaming, but nothing really changed.
Why should it make licensing more expensive? The current setup allows content providers to do deals per country to maximise their profits by charging what the market will bear in each country. But then they also want to take advantage of the single market for payments and, most often, tax so that all deals content is licensed from a single subsidiary in a low-tax country, to other subsidiaries in other countries. Why should the advantage only be one way?
However, a simple Geo-IP block covering Russia and China massively reduces the amount of attack traffic hitting your servers.
Yes, it’s not 100% effective, but it does either stop some traffic or disrupt some botnet attacks where part of the attack includes a “call home”.
You could compare it with NAT, not really a security solution, but an aid to sifting the wheat from the chaff.
I'll have you know that my £10 a month dedicated server in France is great for downloading content that I could have literally downloaded off my TV just minutes earlier but for some reason I'm not allowed to despite being in the UK, the creators being in the UK, it being broadcast for free in the UK, and the digital platform for all of that being in the UK, and me being licenced specifically to receive such programmes in the UK.
Not just iPlayer, etc. but the one I always found hilarious was downloading Channel 4 or BBC content on Youtube... it was so often blocked in the UK ("This content is not available in your country") that I bought a server to download what I'd literally missed by seconds recording off the airwaves (DVB-T / DVB-S) that had recently blown through my house unencrypted anyway.
There are a bunch of companies, typically in the business of copyright, who try as much as they can to charge a different price for the same thing depending on the country of the user, just so that they can extract the maximum amount from everybody. The EU has made this illegal, and it should now be possible to buy a movie or subscription anywhere in the EU and watch it anywhere else. The same should apply to Apple.
I was in a transition between countries and jobs, and due to specific banking and government apps not being global(tied to a region store), I had to have two apple IDs. Switching between Apple IDs sucks too... your xxx will be deleted, and available on iCloud for 30 days. I know I lost a chunk of photos somewhere.
I've been using two apple IDs quite happily on my devices since I moved to the US 6 years ago. Downloads from both co-exist on my device quite happily, especially things like banking apps which tend to be country locked. I think the trick is not to change the phone's registered apple ID but to log in/out of the apple store one with your different IDs. Amazingly the advice to do this is actually on the apple site!
Good point! I see that Eric Root gives those workarounds here (2020) and here (2022) for example.
It's just too bad though (for me) that I'm geoblocked from setting up a first Apple account while on travel ... to download and install my very first app, as required for MFA into my institution's systems from abroad (emails and such), that I've just learned is itself otherwise geoblocked! Navigating this labyrinthine nightmare without a map or paddle has been like jumping through a series of catch-22 hoops and riddles, wrapped in mysteries, inside multiple enigmas, right up shit creek ... IMHO.
Luckily (as they say around here): "Les voyages forment la jeunesse!" (even after retirement it seems!)
I'm in a perpetual state of that (US/UK), and I can't tell you how often I wished Apple would make iOS able to simply switch between different Apple IDs as it's possible on Android.
I have two Apple IDs (one US, one UK), but having to switch back and forth in the iOS app store is a PITA, also because apps installed from one region won't update when logged in with another region. It's a complete clusterfuck. So I now carry two iPhones around even though I could have all my phone numbers (all eSIMs) on one phone.
Apple introduced this problem when they forced people to start using E-mail addresses as user IDs. It's a stupid policy that predictably resulted in people setting up multiple IDs when their E-mail addresses changed.
At one point enough people complained that Apple actually responded, but only to huffily declare that they weren't going to fix the problem and allow people to merge accounts. Typical behavior from a company that loves to break shit and then not provide any solution... even at a fee.
The EU has mandated that Apple stuff work a certain way in the EU, which requires geolocking options. EU nations have specific national laws that also require it. You'd think they'd be pleased that Apple is implementing ways of complying with this.
I agree that geoblocking/geolocking should be abolished, but most government/corporate/legal stuff requires it.
Still, nice if the EU is demanding that geoblocking be ignored, for DVDs. BDs and other services. That's helpful.
The Services Directive, meanwhile, "requires that general conditions of access to a service do not contain discriminatory provisions relating to the nationality or place of residence of the service recipient."
Meanwhile, banks closing accounts of EU nationals when they leave the EU to live in countries deemed "high risk" by said banks.
Meanwhile, banks closing accounts of EU nationals when they leave the EU to live in countries deemed "high risk" by said banks.
Not even when they leave the EU. Pre-Brexit there were many cases of banks in the UK simply closing accounts of people living in other EU countries, because the workload of complying with all the new EU anti-money-laundering rules was not worth the hassle for the few accounts concerned.
Most of the time such closures were motivated by finding that the address they were using (or claimed to be living) was not where they were living
That's one of the biggest red flags for money laundering that banks face huge fines if they ignore it
But blame the EU, sure, why not?
Nope, the Halifax just closed my account because I lived in another EU country, they were quite open about it. Everything was above board, I'd had that account for 20+ years, but the new rules made it not worth while keeping me as a customer. I moved my money to a Channel Islands account instead, which also paid a better interest rate.
The licence terms for one of the leading PCB CAD software companies limits usage to one site. Even for a perpetual licence. Strictly, this prohibits using the s/w when working from home. And they do monitor your IP address (their licence server is needed for the s/w to start). I got a threatening email after working in the office, having previously been working mostly from home. Fortunately, it turned out that the office IP address appeared to be in Dublin, so was obviously wrong.
At the moment, they seem not too bothered about occasional remote working (in the same country). But this might change when we do not renew the annual maintenance. The problem is that maintenance is no longer available. Instead, it is either a perpetual licence (at that version) or a one year term licence (at 2 1/2 x cost of previous maintenance).
Image if car companies did this. Half way across the Severn bridge your car stops and a message comes up "your license (sic - American) does not allow multi-region travel." Can I upgrade? "No. You can either upgrade to a cost effective new (back dated) rental agreement or buy a new car with the mulit-region option. This option is only available for the highest spec car.
Yeah, I hear that's what happened to the MV Dali cargo ship (named after Salvador Dalí) when it tried to cross the Francis Scott Key Bridge ... geoblocking can be so surreal!
Are they the same across the entire EU, so you don't pay more for a subscription to watch Italian football if you live in Italy than if you live in Estonia? Or is as I guess it is, and you do pay more if you live in Italy?
If the EU is allowing (i.e. allowing rights owners to enforce their copyright in this way) geo-locking in some places then Apple would have to have a way to pick and choose what they geo-lock and what they don't. Will the EU indemnify Apple if they do what the EU wants here, and they get sued because someone who wants to pay less for football has their Apple ID residing in a "cheap" country and are able to use the App Store to purchase a subscription to football at a discounted rate on that basis?
This seems like a messy business. I'm sure Apple is being overly restrictive, but they probably can't just remove all restrictions within the EU either. If they have to tune their geo-locking on a case by case business it'll be messy, expensive and error-prone. If the err on the side of caution then the EU will have to occasionally slap them to remove that overly cautious case but if they err in the other direction they could be liable to a big lawsuit unless they get some sort of indemnification if the EU believes they are doing their best and simply screwed up and injured some third party by costing them revenue.
Are they the same across the entire EU, so you don't pay more for a subscription to watch Italian football if you live in Italy than if you live in Estonia? Or is as I guess it is, and you do pay more if you live in Italy?
The prices can be different in different countries, but if you buy a subscription from your home country, you must be able to watch it from anywhere in EU. The rights owners cannot block you using geolocation. You are expected to buy a subscription from your home country, and companies are allowed to check where you live... But they don't have to. A company in Estonia does not have to check that you are living in Estonia.
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