In my perusal of German news and documentary media, I have often found that material pertaining to English-speaking countries is “in Ihrem Land nicht verfügbar” (Unavailable in your country), and frequently goes on to say that it’s due to publishing rights restrictions. With news items, it sort of makes sense, although I thought the internet was supposed to free us from this sort of thing. That was probably Internet 1.0, though, and not the internet as it currently exists.
At the moment, I am experiencing a more personal aggravation from this. I would really like to download a particular German novel, but the audible.com website only offers the English translation. On the German audible.de website, I can find the book in German, but with the error message that it’s unavailable in my country, as above. Why is this? Why do copyright restrictions go beyond preventing piracy to making a work completely unavailable to people in other countries? People like me come up with money in our fist, completely willing to pay for the writer’s creativity and effort, and we’re not allowed to do it. Again, why is this?
I’m so very frustrated and a little angry about this.
ETA: This doesn’t happen with most novels, but just a few.
Copyright is basically it: not only the actual restrictions but whether people know how to deal with them. If the copyright owner has notions of licensing the content for your location, they won’t make it available cross-location. If they’ve already licensed it, they again won’t make it available cross-location, but finding the place where you can get it can be a bit of a hike: nobody says “this content isn’t available in your location from this site but you can get it from freebooksinyourlocation-dot-com”.
Sometimes there’s other factors: BBC is financed by UK taxes, so only those parts of their content specifically earmarked for international use are internationally available; conversely, TVE is financed by Spanish taxes but anything you can see in their site is available wherever. And right now, there are many companies outside the EU which won’t make any material available to people with EU IP addresses for fear of falling afoul of EU privacy laws (just don’t collect personal information, it shouldn’t be so difficult).
Somebody has the exclusive licence to distribute the German-language audiobook in your country. Audible.de is not that person; therefore you can’t buy it from them. Audible.com (if it s a separate entity from audible.de) probably doesn’t have the licence either; if they did they would presumably be offering the work for sale.
The only person you can buy it from is the holder of the exclusive licence and, even then, only if that person is willing to sell. If demand is sufficiently small in your region, though, it may not be worth the licenceholder’s while to bear the costs of establishing a distribution channel. Or, such a channel may exist, but you may not be aware of it.
UDS has it. Assorted media - movies, recordings, books, sports events, whatever content - the publisher/distributor has licensed the work to a specific group or company to distribute in a certain market. I assume there’s a small market, for example, for German language books in North America - so the North American publisher probably ha the rights there, and since the content has been translated and recorded, it costs nothing to add it to their website (except to pay a fee to the German distributor for the translated version). Generally license are by region, not language. Just, I imagine the Korean or Thai distributor would need to do the translation themselves, but the more widespread languages (English to Spanish, for example) there may or may not be a single translation. I do recall that for example, the Quebec market was too small that French versions of Hollywood blockbusters would have to wait until the France release date (used to be several months later, way back when) and so the French version of a blockbuster would not hit the Motreal theatres until months after the English hype over the movie was over. But French theatres were not allowed to use Quebec dubs, because - cultural protectionism.
I saw this most often with Netflix. The content licensed here in Canada had some different shows from the USA, and different again in UK. We used to be able to watch American-licensed shows with a VPN to the USA, but Netflix bowed to studio pressure and began blocking VPN’s.
A company that neglects to enforce the regional requirement will eventually not be doing business; after all, the German (or in our case Canadian) company with the rights will complain to the licensor if they lose sales because people are buying from elsewhere; it reduces the amount they are willing to pay the copyright owner for local distribution rights. You probably see it with documentaries and such because the English original material is lucrative enough that the distributors can make multiple deals with different countries - whereas selling German material to the USA or Australia or UK, the German publishers probably only make one deal for foreign sales, not dozens.
The fundamental issue is that copyright law follows national boundaries. Usually when you cross a boundary, there are slightly different rules.
And the copyright owner has to determine whether to establish distribution in that country.
On top of that, there can be reasons that a copyright owner or the owner’s exclusive licensees prevented from distributing in a country or doesn’t want to. It’s diffetrnt in every case so there’s no way to give a blanket answer.
And copyright law is not just about preventing piracy. The U.S. copyright law for example gives the copyright owner several exclusive rights, including the right to distribute and display a work. And exclusive right means that the copyright owner has the right to prevent reproduction, distribution, and display of a work.
You may think of copyright as a way of paying people for their creative work. But publishers don’t see it that way: they see copyright as a way of paying people for promoting and publication.
My willingnes to pay for creative works doesn’t actually increase the value of publishing and promoting. Quite the reverse: if creative work depended only on individuals deciding what content they wanted to consume, that would dimish the role of publishing companies
electronbee, the question was why content is geographically restricted, not how to bypass such restrictions. While your instructions might not be a violation of copyright per se, they’re very similar to methods for doing so, and I’m pretty sure there are laws against it.