Just wondering, since most reactions from Americans who've never experienced this are usually tame and rational:<p>Does anybody realize how infuriating and humiliating it is to be refused service <i>because you're from the "wrong" country</i>?<p>No matter what the economic and legal rationale behind it is, it is just <i>so fundamentally very very wrong</i> to treat potential customers, or even people in general like that.<p>It pretty much cancels out any argument in favor of copyright: if this is the result of copyright, it's not something we as a society should want.
I have a netflix account (paid via a valid USA credit card that I can still legally operate), but now reside in India and cant' stream. I ended up buying a VPN account in USA (StrongVPN) to stream.<p>I think what media companies need to understand is how digital distribution has no relation to countries/boundaries. I can walk down the road that I now live in India and find pirated same <i></i>English<i></i> movies for around $3, and save a lot of money on streaming (bandwidth is expensive here).
I wonder what the studios are trying to prevent here. I feel there is a genuine demand for netflix like subscription based movie service in India, which could operate with willing paid subscribers. This is a genuine case to reduce piracy here.<p>Sad state of affairs, but nothing out of the ordinary.
It still amuses me to no end that I can buy DVDs and CDs at Amazon but I can't buy a MP3 or stream video.<p>Which is why I think this situation is less about contracts and more about pure technophobia.
unifying copyright laws globally has already been tried with ACTA [<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agree...</a>]<p>It's a dumb idea - flawed with millions of different problems and basically lends itself to favouring countries whose majority of national assets are heavily based on intellectual property [hence the reason ACTA was put forward by Japan and USA - the later mainly due to political lobbying]<p>The reality is - enforcing copyright laws based on one jurisdiction [ala USA] - on <i>every</i> other jurisdiction is a bad idea. Of course, the USA tries to "force" its bilateral and multilateral trade relations with new clauses requiring higher intellectual property standards. This 'stark picture' is already being painted on the 2010 USTR Special Report 301 [basically bad IP enforcement countries - primarily the BRIC [brazil/russia/india/china] block] where not one single African nation is listed on the reports Watch List - WTF ? Yes, why are some of the poorest african nations strongly enforcing IP rights ? You guessed it - trade preferences with the USA.<p>So yes - it sucks "only within the United States" - but I would rather that than some moron in a USA movie studio office, sipping cognac and lighting up a cigar telling me how my country should run its domestic law [pardon the gross generalization of movie studio executives painted from movie studio produced movies].<p>No thanks.
The problem is that marketing is still what drives big numbers to watching a show. Lots of money is spent so that people know when the premiere and finale of each show is, every season. When shows are sold internationally, it's the local distributor who puts up the money to do all of the local marketing and slots in a local TV channel or other distribution. If a show was made everywhere internationally, the local distributor would miss out on the ability to monetize that viewer, since they went to the US site and watched it there. Some of the youngest, savviest audiences (ie the most valuable) would be lost.<p>This would go away if it was possible to synchronize broadcast episode schedules in all target markets, but that's almost impossible due to local differences. Also, it would mean that shows need to air the same time, and TV shows are really risky. Nobody is going to put up shows for international distribution until they've seen how it does in the US first.<p>This can also go away if a show goes exclusively pay-per-episode. This would only work for certain shows (can't see this for American Idol, but maybe for Breaking Bad), and only if streaming numbers were huge. Right now, they're pretty small. Hulu gets 6-7mm unique viewers per month across all of their content. It's safe to assume even a popular TV show is only going to get a few hundred thousand at the most. Breaking Bad's finale received 1.9mm TV viewers, so it's still TV that's driving scale. For more popular shows like Big Bang Theory, it's a few times that.<p>Very exciting times, but it will take a while. It was only in 2011 when we got services like Spotify broadly available for music, even though iTunes launched in 2001. Ten years to shift the consumer habits (ownership of bits; legacy of plastic CDs), industry thinking (signing the big 4; establishing royalty structures), and technical availability (3G/4G widely avail). Hulu launched publicly in 2008, so I'm looking forward to 2018.
Free music download <a href="http://google.cn/music/" rel="nofollow">http://google.cn/music/</a> not available in your region<p>I don't think the corporate-powers-that-be will be happy until the internet is carved up into dvd-like-regions where they can charge different prices for the same thing and subsidize one country with another.
Language matters. So maybe we should start to call such services "intranet services", to reflect what it is. It's ok, if companies decide to target specific countries, but they really shouldn't call it "internet" then, since this is technically wrong.
To get around this in Australia I've been using unblock-us.com. I can now get Hulu & Netflix.<p>However buying music is another story. Songs in iTunes are around 50% more expensive in the Australian store. That's pretty disgusting.<p>The best alternative would be Amazon - but they don't sell to anyone outside of the US.
This is what I call "internet nationalism". The nationalists have been on the rise over the last few years, and I expect that the eventual destination is a balkanized internet.
I can't help but think that the VPN business is a good place to be, as national borders encroach more and more on the Internet. I've been using VPNs to access US content from Canada for a while, and a handful of acquaintances have begun to do the same.<p>If the old-school content providers don't want my money, because I live in the wrong country, the market has provided me a way to get around that problem by helping me to pretend that I am in the <i>right</i> country.
This isn't only difficult for consumers, but for producers as well.<p>For example: a few years ago I worked on a worldwide project for Metallica (www.missionmetallica.com). Get the laughter out of your system now........<p>Metallica is represented in the US by Warner Bros. Records and internationally by UMG. As such, while WBR was fronting the development and maintenance of the site, we had to enable Universal International marketing to sell it through all their international retail partners worldwide and ex-US.<p>That was over 30 different partners. So imagine trying to integrate into commerce systems for 30 partners, in dozens of languages and currencies.<p>In the end we resorted to the easiest API in the world: 16 digit alphanumeric codes and a huge HTML table to track everything for reporting.<p>It sucked.<p>International rights aren't just a stupid thing that is invented by content and media companies to make your life harder. They make everyone's lives harder. It's the collision of globalization and lack of one global government/economy. C'est la.
I don't see the major new issue here. Everybody gets their tv of a torrent or rapidshare or some other place that is willing to give it to them. Copyright holders know, but don't seem to want to do anything about the legality of this issue.<p>So why is this a discussion worth having.
I honestly get the feeling that the entertainment industry thinks by continuing to refuse to adapt it can force us to just abandon that whole 'internet' fad and go back to some nostalgic dream world where consumers bought retail products for full RRP.
When I first read the title, I assumed this was about Twitter's new country-based censorship[1], which IMHO is a much more egregious attack on a freedom that the internet has made possible (speech) than the availability of for-profit media the OP highlights.<p>[1] <a href="http://blog.twitter.com/2012/01/tweets-still-must-flow.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.twitter.com/2012/01/tweets-still-must-flow.html</a>