Abstract
One of the most popular – and misleading – myths about the internet is that it is a place and space without borders. In fact, the internet is full of borders and walls. These borders and walls are perhaps most apparent in relation to cultural media goods such as video and audio streamed online: With the exception of perhaps some Americans who never travel abroad and who never seek to track down non-American produced digital video and audio content, it's safe to say that nearly all internet users have come up against cultural content barriers which prevent them from accessing content they would like to access.
These barriers, typically, though not exclusively, put in place by online digital steaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney + , are a result of the complex system of copyright and content creator rights and revenue production mechanisms that have grown up around cultural media products such as film, television and popular music. This complex – one might even call it mind-numbingly complex – system of cultural content rights and copyright has historically been tied to national borders and national contexts and it has been carried – unfortunately say many critics, and I am among these critics -- into the internet age. Here, it has been reconstructed primarily via the mechanism of geoblocking, or the electronic denial of access to online digital content predicated on the identification of so-called IP addresses of internet users, which establish a given user's physical/geographical location in the world. Thus, for example, an internet user located in Germany cannot access the same content on Netflix as a user located in the United States or France can – unless this user makes use of VPN software that projects a false IP address which Netflix, or another online digital streaming provider is not able to identify as a “fake” VPN generated IP address.
The complex, and, from a consumer perspective, thoroughly vexing issue of geoblocking is a primary, though not sole, focus of Digital Peripheries: The Online Circulation of Visual Content from the Small Market Perspective, a 300-plus page volume edited by Petr Szczepanik, Pavel Zahrádka, Jakub Macek, and Paul Stepan. Published by Springer Open in 2020 as part of the Springer Series in Media Industries, the lengthy volume – there are 17 separate chapters divided into five different parts -- focuses in particular on the questions of geoblocking as these relate to efforts in the European Union to create a Digital Single Market (DSM). Digital Peripheries offers a very specific, detailed, and up-to-date look at the many issues that swirl around the intersections between copyright, content creation and production, distribution, and consumption. On the whole, it is a fascinating read, in particular if you – like me – are extremely interested in why national borders continue to get erected on the internet in ways that severely impede and restrict consumer choice and access to content. My own experience with geoblocking is a long one. I have spent the last 16 years trying to circumvent geoblocking of cultural content so that I can use what often, though not always is, American-produced video content dubbed into German to help raise my two daughters, who are now 17 and 15, as English-German bilinguals.
The different ways in which smaller markets and national contexts have been affected by the massive move, globally, toward online digital cultural media product distribution and the many ways in which various players and actors are positioned with respect to online digital cultural media distribution receive much detailed and insightful attention in Digital Peripheries. And, although some of the chapters and contributors lean heavily toward my own view – or a view that supports the near total elimination of a cultural media product revenue and rightsholder model rooted in anachronistic national border foundations – other contributors to Digital Peripheries offer a perspective that holds, persuasively in many cases, that the erasure of national border delineated copyright and content producer rightsholder revenue schemata could potentially prove disastrous for some cultural content producers and some (smaller) national cultural contexts such as the Czech Republic.
Digital Peripheries is certainly worth leafing through for anyone interested in not only digital rights management as this management, in particular, relates to national borders on the internet. It's also worth a read for those interested more broadly in larger questions of social and cultural and economic and political power as these link to (lack of) cultural flows within, and across, national borders, within the EU -- and beyond. In other words, any scholar interested in the complex dynamics between globalization, media, culture and power is likely to enjoy diving in to at least several chapters in Digital Peripheries. Those more interested in broader global media and communication and culture theory questions and issues will, in particular, gravitate toward the following parts of the book: The Introduction by Petr Szczepanik, Pavel Zahrádka and Jakub Macek, which focuses on “Theorizing (the) Digital Peripheries”, “Part I: On Boundaries and Scales: Reconceptualizing Digital Markets”, which contains smart, interesting, reflective and thought-provoking theoretically oriented chapters by Ira Wagman, who focuses on re-thinking how media studies conceptualizes markets and market size in Chapter 2, “Small, Middle, Test: Rescaling Peripheral Media Markets,” and Ramon Lobato, who advances a persuasive argument for conceptualizing markets in a less economistic and narrow way and in a broader “socio-cultural” way in Chapter 3, “On the Boundaries of Digital Markers.” This same audience will also be interested in “Part II: Regulating Online Boundaries: Territoriality Versus Digital Single Market” and its three chapters – Radim Polčák's Chapter 4, “Territoriality of Copyright Law,” which provides an informative and critically and theoretically sound overview of the historical links between copyright law and national (territorial) boundaries, Julia Reda's extremely persuasive “smackdown” of geoblocking in Chapter 5, “Geoblocking: At Odds with the EU Single Market and Consumer Expectations,” and Pavel Zahrádka's Chapter 6, “The Czech and Slovak Audiovisual Market as a Laboratory Experiment for the Digital Single Market in Europe,” which locates the broader discussions Polčák and Reda examine in two specific case studies.
Parts III and IV of Digital Peripheries zero in on specific case studies examining various questions that swirl around digital rights management and video production, distribution and consumption in a number of small market countries and sub-national regions including Poland, the Czech Republic, Greece and Flanders. All eight chapter contributions in these two sections are interesting and insightful. I especially enjoyed Lydia Papadimitriou's examination of online digital video distribution issues and questions in Greece in “Digital Film and Television Distribution in Greece: Between Crisis and Opportunity” and and Tae-Sik Kim's “Finding Larger Transnational Media Markets: Media Practices of the Vietnamese Diasporic Community.” Papadimitriou's contribution on Greece is detailed, well-structured, informative, links effectively to Lobato's earlier theoretical chapter in the volume, and provides good insight into a market that not many people know much about, Greece. Kim's chapter is noteworthy for its unusual focus: The media consumption practices of Vietnamese diaspora in The Czech Republic. Kim reviews various life contexts of the different Vietnamese populations in the Czech Republic and discusses how these populations have largely been “erased” from the Czech media landscape because of their adoption of transnational media practices (p. 202). Particularly fascinating are the ways in which second generation Vietnamese immigrants mix the global and the local to create and fashion new identities.
Part V of Digital Peripheries returns more consistently to the question of digital rights management and compensatory systems for content producers than Parts III and IV, which include several contributions more grounded in audience studies than in rightsholder questions as these relate to online streaming and national borders. Part V's return to more of a focus on digital (online) rights management is a logical way to close a volume in which 70% of the contributions do, indeed, focus on this issue.
Christian Handke's Chapter 15, “Compensation Systems for Online Use,” which puts forward an alternative to the current digital (online) rights management schemata that has, for the most part, simply carved up the internet according to national borders and copyright distribution rights linked to national border payment schemes for video content producers whose work is streamed online, stands as the broadest “theme” striking chapter in Part V. Handke proposes a Copyright Compensations Systems (CCS) approach which would “provide end users with legal certainty when using widely available online resources to access and use creative works, in return for a surcharge on Internet subscription, the receipts of which are disseminated among rightsholders” (p. 262).
Rudolf Leška also examines broader issues surrounding digital rights management and the compensation of film and video producers in Chapter 16, “Sync That Tune! The Role of Collective Management Rights in Film Production and Distribution.” Leška concludes that the process for rights clearing of various content in films – music, images, graphics, etc. – has typically been so complex that “once we add the layer of global online use, the situation becomes a nearly impenetrable thicket of rights and rightsholders” (p. 289). Leška's observations resonate: It really does seem as if the landscape of digital rights management and compensatory systems for film and video producers is: a) way too complex; b) way too balkanized; c) skewed to suit the (economic) interests of big film and video producers and distributors; d) exceedingly frustrating for consumers of streaming video, especially consumers from minority groups with minority interests such as my own interest in using online video streaming as a device to further the learning of a language that is not local in the geographic context in which I and my kids live.
Petr Bilík concludes Digital Peripheries with a close look at the film funding system in the Czech Republic in Chapter 17, “Small Country, Complex Film Policy: The Case of the Czech Film Funding System.” He notes that despite many (external) challenges the Czech film industry has managed to maintain its strength and robustness in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia, which is sufficiently culturally similar to The Czech Republic to serve as a lucrative market for Czech films. However, like many film industries in smaller markets and in markets with less powerful and widespread languages such as Czech, the Czech film industry has not had as much success in terms of exports, prior to, and during, the era of online video streaming distribution, though, as Bilík notes, it has had some success internationally, for instance, a Czech film Kolya directed by Jan Svěrák received an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1996.
Overall, Digital Peripheries provides an interesting, deep, theoretically and empirically engaging examination of the complex interplay between film and video producers, distributors and consumers in the age of online video streaming, which, in theory, should lend itself well to cross-border and international and transnational interaction but which, in reality, as Digital Peripheries clearly underscores, is a way away from being truly international in scope. This is true both within the EU, and outside of the EU thanks to the continued widespread practice of geoblocking, or the blocking of access to online cultural media products and content based on the geographic IP addresses of internet users. From a consumer perspective and, particularly from the perspective of a consumer interested in using the internet and cultural video streaming products for less common, less majoritarian practices such as, for instance, helping to teach one's kids a foreign language that has little to no presence in the geographic place in which one lives, geoblocking has always been, continues to be, and, as Digital Peripheries underscores, likely will continue to be a vexing problem for a long time to come, both within the EU, which clearly has not yet truly developed a DSM for streaming filmic and video content and, to a lesser degree, audio and (pop) music content, as well as around the world more generally.
