The objective of Regulation (official document) is to adapt the harmonised legal framework on copyright and related rights and to provide a common approach to the provision of online content services to subscribers temporarily present in Member States other than their Member State of residence, in order to ensure that the present barriers to cross-border portability of online content services in the internal market no longer exist.
The Regulation should, therefore, apply to online content services that a service provider, after having obtained the relevant rights from right holders in a given territory, provides to its subscribers on the basis of a contract, by any means including streaming, downloading or any other technique which allows use of that content. A registration to receive content alters or a mere acceptance of HTML cookies should not be regarded as a contract for the provision of online content service for the purposes of Regulation.
An online service provider which is not an audio-visual media service within the meaning of Directive 2010/13/EU and which uses works, other subject matter or transmissions of broadcasting organisations in a merely ancillary manner should not be covered by proposed regulation. Such services include web-sites that use works or other protected subject matter only in an ancillary manner such as graphical elements or music used as background, where the main purpose of such web-sites is, for example, the sale of goods.