Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

How about we try something a little simpler first. A single market for movies, series, and music. Ensuring that companies can create streaming services that can be accessed by all 500 million EU citizens without a needless negotiation in all member states for the rights.

I say we try that first and see how effectively the EU can actually create a single market, before we try something as fluffy as "data".

View on HN

This is actually not simpler as it's governed by a billion different licensing agreements, rules etc.

To give one example: These are nationally negotiated because languages vary. One key and for once reasonable argument for why you need national licenses is the language issue: if you allow more easy transfer across borders the market for translated versions will basically crash as may don't need them - at the same time a number of people to depend on them, and for any smaller country (say: Estonia, Malta, Czechia, even Greece) there simply won't be any more dubbed versions if the English version is more easily available.

Another reason is the chance for local players to do anything at all. If you give single licenses basically all the small local players (say a Latvian TV station) will have to pay the same as someone streaming across Europe, and basically anything from football league matches to Hollywood movies will end up locked into the big channels like RTL and Sky.

Dubbed movies can die in a fire for all I care.

Well, I'm in a country where they tried introducing one dubbed movie in cinemas once and that triggered so much of a scandal that they never tried again.

With the exception of little kid's movies, but even those are available subtitled in the original language.

> there simply won't be any more dubbed versions if the English version is more easily available.

This is a good thing. Dubbing needs to die and it cannot happen fast enough. The vast majority of German speakers think dubbing is normal, but if they actually watch original language material for a couple of months they cannot go back to dubbed versions because it is just so abhorrent, unnatural, and unsynchronized.

> Another reason is the chance for local players to do anything at all.

How does this work in the US or other big countries with a single market? Does a small radio station get (and pay) the licence to broadcast some song nationwide?

There are large blanket licenses that professional broadcasters can acquire.

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-radio-station-able-to-play-...

But how does that solve the problem that the poster above me mentioned?

Why would it be harder or more expensive for a small European radio station, compared to small US radio station?

I'm not a lawyer or legal expert, but I think that over the past century the entertainment industry has successfully gotten a myriad of laws and court rulings in their favor which complicates something like that a lot. Data is new and fluffy and there are still many areas where it's unsettled who owns the data. The EU probably sees the opportunity to write the rules in a more "blank sheet of paper" kind of way when this industry is still relatively young, and not repeat the mistakes of the entertainment industry where the governments have been sleepwalking for the better part of a century.

There's something along those lines here (in progress in 2017), but I don't know the status.

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/proposal-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com