‘We are Sorry This Video Is Not Available in Your Country’: An Ethical Analysis of Geo-blocking Audio-Visual Online Content

This article provides an ethical analysis of the moral conflict over access to premium audio-visual online content, which is currently regulated by geo-blocking in the domain of digital film distribution. We first identify the stakeholders of this conflict, which are the rights holders on the one hand – that is, creators, producers and distributors of audio-visual content – and the consumers of audio-visual content on the other. We also identify their interests, moral rights and moral intuitions based on interviews with representatives of the interested parties and by conducting an analysis of their position papers on the Digital Single Market strategy initiatives presented by the European Commission in the years 2015 to 2018. The moral rights and legitimate interests of stakeholders are then balanced and specified. We propose four ethical principles that set out the conditions under which the geo-blocking of audio-visual content is either ethically justified or unjustified.