Yesterday, the traditionally highly conservative legal affairs committee voted to end geo-blocking of films and series in some limited contexts. It's a tectonic shift from the previous position of the legal affairs committee, and comes ahead of today's vote in the more progressive Internal Market & Consumer protection, where MEPs will call for a gradual abolition of geo-blocking.
Would be nice if they expanded it to all digital goods - to include music, for instance, and things like youtube videos (technically not films or series, as I'm sure somebody at google will point out).
Does that mean we will finally get rid of that silly regional distributor nonsense left over from physical distribution that leads to different release dates and different versions being released in different countries?
But then people might be tempted to watch the original version instead of shitty dubs. Distributors might even start using subtitles in more countries! /s
So the crazy thing is the audiovisual lobbyists didn't even want us to mention piracy. Like, we wanted to say that we need more legal avenues for access to content to reduce piracy, and they wouldn't accept it.
Great this is happening! Such an important and impactful resolution and the person from the xweet couldn't stop herself from commenting everything with cringe gifs...