The EU Commission has drafted a proposal for a new EU regulation to be adopted by the EU Parliament and the European Council.
The EU Commission primarily identifies the established objective of establishing and ensuring the functioning of the European single market, along with the associated freedom to provide and utilize cross-border services, as the legal basis.
Many users of streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Video, Spotify, or similar services offering online content encounter difficulties using these services when traveling to other European countries for vacation. The services are then unavailable there due to licensing restrictions, as service providers have only acquired or made available usage rights for content in the respective home country of the consumer. This involves the granting of so-called 'territorial licenses'.
Given that technological development and the resulting demand for cross-border use of online content, driven by an increasing number of online service users and a continuously rising number of mobile devices, will continue to advance in the future, it is in the interest of many consumers to be able to use these paid online services abroad.
In providing services to consumers, online service providers employ so-called geoblocking, which blocks foreign IP addresses containing a country-specific identifier from accessing content abroad. This allows the provider to determine the user's country of origin and typically compares this information with the billing address provided during registration or other specific user data. If the country identifier of the IP address does not match the user's residential address, the consumer will have little chance of accessing the content abroad. This practice is justified by the contractual agreement of a 'territorial protection clause' between service providers and users/subscribers.
The EU Commission has now submitted a proposal to establish a uniform regulation for the European single market concerning the use of online content services. The EU Commission emphasizes that individual countries are unable to provide the offered services cross-border, as this constitutes a cross-border issue, given that, for instance, copyrights and other intellectual property rights have been harmonized across various EU directives within the European Union.
As an additional supporting argument, the EU Commission also points out that roaming charges are progressively moving towards abolition. These charges are slated to be reduced to lower rates (0.05 € per call minute, 0.02 € per SMS, and 0.05 € per MB of data volume) as early as April 2016. By June 2017, roaming charges are to be completely abolished, enabling mobile internet users to pay the same fees abroad as they do at home, without surcharges. This will also significantly increase the demand for online content from service providers.
We will promptly inform you about the entry into force of the EU regulation or any changes to the aforementioned information.
Goldberg Attorneys at Law 2016
Reported by Timo Möllers
Email: info@goldberg.de
