The geographical blocking of copyrighted works - such as music and online games as well as e-books - still has a long way to go. Following an initial evaluation of Regulation 2018/302, published on Monday 30 November, the European Commission considered that it was too early to tackle this issue, announcing a further review in 2022.
Instead, it announced the launch of an enhanced dialogue with stakeholders specifically on copyright-protected audiovisual content before, it said, considering follow-up measures (see EUROPE 11909/1).
A review of the Geo-blocking Regulation
It is well known that this was one of the issues that attracted the most attention of the previous European Commissioner for Digital Agenda. At the beginning of his mandate, Andrus Ansip expressed his indignation at not being able to watch a football match broadcast in his country, Estonia, from his office in Brussels and announced his firm intention to end geographical blocking.
But he came up against the powerful industrial lobby and scaled down his ambitions, limiting himself to a Regulation allowing Europeans to travel in Europe with their digital subscription (2017/1128) and a Regulation prohibiting unjustified discrimination based on nationality, place of residence or place of establishment in the context of online commerce (302/2018).
However, at the insistence of the European Parliament, this Regulation - which has been in force since 3 December 2018 - included a revision clause to examine the advisability of extending the scope of the Regulation to other services, such as copyright-protected content.
Increased dialogue on audiovisual content
On average, a European consumer has access to only 14% of the films available online in the EU27. However, there are significant variations between countries, with viewers in Greece having access to only 1.3% of films available online in the EU, while those in Germany have access to 43.1%. Yet the number of consumers trying to access audiovisual content offered in other Member States almost doubled between 2015 and 2019, from 5 to 9%.
In this context, the evaluation suggests increasing the dialogue with industry in the framework of the future Media Action Plan to be presented by the Commission on 2 December. It emphasises the principle of territoriality, whereby the distributor has rights per country, including passive sales (where the service is not actively promoted). In this context, it recalls the Canal+ v Commission case before the Court of Justice (Case C-132/19), which could change this practice.
What about other services?
As regards other online content services partially covered by the current Regulation (such as access to music, e-books or video games), the report concludes that a further extension of the scope of the Regulation would not necessarily bring substantial benefits to consumers in terms of choice of content, as the proposed services are rather homogeneous (in many cases over 90%) across Member States.
The report also highlights potential impacts on the price of services in some Member States.
See the evaluation report: https://bit.ly/3qdmX3X (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)