If you’ve ever tried to watch a TV show or access a news site from a country other than your own, chances are you will have come across licensing.
Essentially, if you’re trying to access media from a particular region, that content may be blocked under ‘licensing regulations’, or you may not see it at all. Here is a brief guide to how global licensing works and how it affects you as the end user.
How Regions Are Divided？
There aren’t any standard boundaries between regions. Thanks to the different types of content created by various companies, each company can set its own regions for viewing.
This is done either by country or larger geographic areas, so one item could be, for example, limited to just the United States. At the same time, other content might be available to the entire North American market.
Specific licenses like those for online casinos are more likely applicable to particular countries, whereas music and film companies often go by region.
This is why an album made in Canada could be available to stream in the US, yet specific online casinos in Canada may only be available to Canadian nationals.
Why Licensing Matters？
In some cases, certain types of content are not allowed in some countries due to laws or limitations. For example, the EU recently adopted the Digital Services Act, which curtails certain content types.
However, in most cases, it comes down to legally binding contracts. Each producer and broadcaster can have their specific preferences, but a few common features tend to appear across all contracts.
The world of TV is the best example. Unless a channel or network explicitly makes a show, the local rights for that show are bought or rented from the production company. This happens for each region in which the show is shown.
These rights enable productions to turn a profit and, in turn, pay crew and actors. On the other hand, showing content without rights can amount to theft or, at the very least, result in severe penalties for the broadcaster, even in the unlikely situation that it was done unintentionally.
Advice for Consumers
As a global community, we are more part of the digital nomad era than ever before. People with online jobs can move between states, countries, or continents.
This does, however, cause issues with accessing content from different regions, whether between different countries or sometimes even specific areas within a single country. More than one nomad has been caught out by their favorite show or music suddenly being restricted.
This is where VPN software comes in handy by making your online location appear to be somewhere else in the world.
If you are, for example, traveling in Europe but desperate to watch your long-running show that’s only available on US sites, a VPN can give you an IP based in the US, which gets around automatic blocks.
It can also help with things like online banking, especially if you can tap into a VPN server local to your original branch.
Licenses are innately confusing concepts wrapped up in a massive pile of legal text, so don’t worry if you don’t get them immediately. Just know that there are often good reasons behind those IP gates!