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?
Considerable part of the push with Digital Single Market is that it should be, well, single market.
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.
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?
However there are two issues here, first is that apps and services (with a few exceptions) are generally not allowed to be geo blocked unlike on demand media and live broadcasting and secondly and what is most likely the main issue here is that Apple using the country where the account is registered in rather than the location of the user at the time of service.
The former is a likely violation of the directive and the latter for sure is.