
Sorry, this blog post is not available in your country. - jelmerdejong
http://jelmerdejong.com/blog/1664/sorry-this-blog-post-is-not-available-in-your-country/
======
rickmb
Just wondering, since most reactions from Americans who've never experienced
this are usually tame and rational:

Does anybody realize how infuriating and humiliating it is to be refused
service _because you're from the "wrong" country_?

No matter what the economic and legal rationale behind it is, it is just _so
fundamentally very very wrong_ to treat potential customers, or even people in
general like that.

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.

~~~
ohgodthecat
Can you tell me a better way to do it?

Right now they only can server certain countries because of license
agreements. I don't use spotify because most of the social sites where there
are good playlists made up are made of songs unavailable in the U.S. and while
yes it is annoying to get that you are in the wrong country message what can
you expect the companies to do?

The thing I would pay most to have access to is BBC iplayers video content but
because I'm American and licensing for things used in those videos differs
here I will never be able to do that.

~~~
skymt
It's simple: we change the license agreements. Media licensing right now is
controlled by people who want to pretend that the Internet can easily be split
into regions just like their physical distribution networks. Distributors have
a lot of pull: Apple was able to convince the record companies to allow
purchase of individual songs, and now that's a huge profit center for the
industry. Next time the licensing is renegotiated, companies like Amazon and
Spotify just need to convince big media that geographic blocking is throwing
away money and encouraging legit customers to turn to piracy.

~~~
icegreentea
But it's not as simple as that. Geographic blocking happens because geography
is tied into legal differences. Differences in laws must be obeyed.

~~~
lwat
If your company is American why should you care if one of your customers is
currently living in some other country? Your company should make sure it's
doing the right thing according to American laws and that customer should
understand that his local laws may be different and that's beyond the
company's control.

Porn companies do not block access for people in Iran do they? Why not? What's
the difference?

~~~
icegreentea
Because the company's giving access are not the companies that own the
copyright. You are correct, if EMI or Fox or whatever decided that they'd
stream their stuff to whoever in the world, they would be perfectly in the
good.

But the companies streaming do not own the copyright. They must get permission
from EMI or Fox or whoever to do so. And the owners feel that it is in their
best interest to approach each geographic/legal region separately, to squeeze
as much money out of the distributor as possible (that's their job in this
context). From the perspective of the distributor, different legal
jurisdictions are a problem because their contracts/agreements with IP owners
are tied to legal jurisdictions. They cannot get around that. For IP owners,
each new market (with its legal jurisdiction) is another chance to get a
better deal.

------
shad0wfax
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.

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 __English __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.

Sad state of affairs, but nothing out of the ordinary.

------
zorked
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.

Which is why I think this situation is less about contracts and more about
pure technophobia.

------
timmyd
unifying copyright laws globally has already been tried with ACTA
[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-
Counterfeiting_Trade_Agree...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-
Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement)]

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]

The reality is - enforcing copyright laws based on one jurisdiction [ala USA]
- on _every_ 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.

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].

No thanks.

~~~
rmc
But we _already_ have a unified copyright law! The Bern Convention of 1886! If
a work is copyrighted in the USA, the it's copyrighted in France. Before this,
say, Charles Dicken's work was copyrighted in the UK, but not the USA. We
already have global copyright works.

In a way, the global copyright causes problems like this. A TV show like
Breaking Bad is copyrighted & shown in the USA, so it's copyrighted in the
Netherlands. However the copyright holder doesn't show/sell the show in the
Netherlands, so a person there (a) can't watch it, and (b) can't pirate it,
since it's copyrighted in their country.

~~~
tsotha
The problem, from the content creators' perspective, is the enforcement of
copyright law varies so widely. In some countries it's draconian, in others
virtually nonexistent. My impression is ACTA was really introduced to, well,
make it draconian everywhere.

I'm not sure how this makes sense for countries that consume more foreign
content than they sell locally produced content in foreign markets.

~~~
skymt
I don't quite follow the reasoning. Wouldn't it make more sense to make legit
media consumption _easier_ in countries with lax copyright enforcement and
widespread infringement?

~~~
tsotha
Not if they think they can force those countries to tighten enforcement. I
think these companies believe if they could just remove all the torrents from
the web they'd get a sale for each torrent they stopped, whereas just making
legit sales available will only capture a small portion of the potential
market.

I seriously doubt that's the case, but it might make sense for them to go this
way - the money they spend buying politicians isn't much in the great scheme
of things. It might even be cheaper than setting up an efficient worldwide
distribution system.

------
chaz
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.

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.

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.

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.

~~~
rickmb
You are so very wrong. Hardly any marketing is done for US shows abroad. You
could easily miss the premiere of a new season if you weren't paying close
attention.

US shows are thrown on the air mostly as filler, with some rare exceptions
they are not the big moneymakers for non-US stations. Although not as
carelessly as in the days before DVD box sets and mass piracy, when a episodes
could be shown in the wrong order, series just disappear from the schedule
unannounced for months, or stay on the shelve for years.

But they will still happily announce a series as "the new hit series from the
US", knowing full well that the show has already been cancelled and they only
have the 13 episodes to air... This is also largely because US shows are sold
as package deals. If you want to buy House for your local market, you also
have to buy the rights to crappy series you know nobody will watch, at least
not on _your_ station. So even if there is a potential audience for those
series, they will barely get a chance to watch the series, since it will be
programmed at some ungodly hour.

The Dutch broadcasters managed to ruin many shows like for instance Six Feet
Under or Battlestar Galactica that way. Yeah, lots of people still saw them,
but either pirated or on DVD. Following them on television was near
impossible.

It's a business-model that prefers to destroy a popular product in order to
maintain an artificial scarcity rather than to sell it directly to the
consumers at reasonable price.

Maintaining this model ensures Hulu is _never_ going to be available outside
the US, unless the whole local broadcast market completely collapses.

Because there is more money to be made in ensuring that a show does _not_
reach its audience. That's how fucked up the system is.

~~~
tsotha
>Maintaining this model ensures Hulu is never going to be available outside
the US, unless the whole local broadcast market completely collapses.

Can that time really be that far off? My impression is there's a huge
demographic split between people who get shows on TV and people who get them
on the internet. Granted, my friends are mostly tech types, but I don't know
_anybody_ who watches television in real time.

How long can the broadcast model survive if nobody is watching the
commercials?

~~~
icebraining
Sorry, I downvoted you by mistake :|

------
cateye
"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't
chew it." - Mark Twain

------
ck2
Free music download <http://google.cn/music/> not available in your region

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.

------
jgfoot
When travelling in Puerto Rico recently I tried to access Hulu, and got the
message that it is available only "within the United States."

~~~
J3L2404
They can become a state and not a territory, but then they would have to pay
federal income taxes so it seems unlikely.

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/05/us-puertorico-
stat...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/05/us-puertorico-status-
idUSTRE7944ZV20111005)

~~~
Dylan16807
I don't see why they need to be a state any more than Washington D.C. does.

~~~
adolfojp
It wouldn't be a matter of needing to be a state but of wanting to be a state.
Right now only about half of the population of Puerto Rico wants the island to
become a state so statehood is not going to happen. But if that number were to
suddenly double then Puerto Ricans should be allowed to form a state if they
wanted to. The alternative would be to deny their wish at self determination
just because they don't "need to" have equal rights or representation. And
that would be a truly rotten course of action. And unlike Puerto Rico, D.C. at
least gets to vote for its president.

------
lignuist
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.

~~~
panacea
I'd rather the whole site was blacked out, rather than the whole page loading,
and a message placed inside the media player chrome _after_ an ad is played.

------
joblessjunkie
If the old media businesses could have their way, Amazon and Hulu and Netflix
wouldn't be available in the US, either.

------
Dramatize
To get around this in Australia I've been using unblock-us.com. I can now get
Hulu & Netflix.

However buying music is another story. Songs in iTunes are around 50% more
expensive in the Australian store. That's pretty disgusting.

The best alternative would be Amazon - but they don't sell to anyone outside
of the US.

~~~
ajtaylor
When I moved to Australia and setup iTunes, I was shocked and pissed off at
the price bump. Yet one more reason to subscribe to alternative methods of
music acquisition. To add insult to injury, the AUD has recently been at par
or stronger than the USD. If the prices were reasonable I would definitely buy
from iTunes. But it's not, so I won't. Simple as that.

~~~
Dramatize
I'm trying to move from downloading music to paying for it.. but they are not
making it easy.

~~~
ajtaylor
Indeed! And Australians are quite aware just how much they are being ripped
off now that online purchases from non-Australian retailers are becoming more
prevalent.

------
motters
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.

------
noarchy
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.

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 _right_ country.

~~~
yoshamano
I'll probably be going the VPN route for the Olympics this year. Here in the
States NBC has exclusive broadcast rights. During the Beijing games they were
testing online streaming for the first time, and it worked great. I could
watch whatever I wanted, when I wanted. During the Vancouver games they
decided to change things up and block access to most of the content unless you
were subscribed to a participating cable or satellite provider. I happened to
be house-sitting for my grandmother at the time who did have such a service. I
could never get the authentication system to work.

So unless NBC changes its tune, I'll be looking to the BBC to actual provide
coverage. Maybe even my friends to the north in Canada. My Canadian friends
said the CBC's coverage of the Vancouver games was excellent.

~~~
gislik
Restricted access is all to familiar for me although the situation feels
slightly better than in the rest of Europe.

A recent trend in bypassing geo-restricted content seems to be a DNS solution.
I signed up for an account with playmoTV (<http://playmo.tv/>) a couple of
months ago which has work quite well in streaming Hulu Plus, Netflix, Pandora
and Spotify here in Iceland. In addition it's quite ironic to see DNS layer
being used to grant access to restricted content while SOPA/PIPA plans to use
it to restrict access even further.

Their focus is to enable access to US content but I have it confirmed from
their help desk that UK support (BBC iPlayer, Sky Go and ITV) is soon to be
announced. Might be something to look into for the Olympics.

------
Tim-Boss
Did the font used on the blog look weird to anyone else? Slightly pixelated?

~~~
neotorama
That's Museo. Not good for text. Georgia is better I guess.

~~~
jelmerdejong
Thanks for the feedback. I use Museo for regular text in an attempt to
differentiate from the 'default' styles. However, it should not bother you
when reading.

~~~
juriga
You might want to use a less fancy font if you want to make sure that your
blog is readable for all users. Here's how it looks like on Chrome/Windows:

<http://i.imgur.com/D77Ey.png> (the a's are especially choppy)

Chrome on Windows uses a different engine for rendering text than Firefox or
IE. They're working on a fix: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3523375>

------
ethank
This isn't only difficult for consumers, but for producers as well.

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........

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.

That was over 30 different partners. So imagine trying to integrate into
commerce systems for 30 partners, in dozens of languages and currencies.

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.

It sucked.

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.

~~~
ahrens
Vie?

------
tomjen3
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.

So why is this a discussion worth having.

~~~
mseebach
> Copyright holders know, but don't seem to want to do anything about the
> legality of this issue.

Except, of course, the minor detail of influencing legislators to the tune of
hundreds of millions of dollars to change to law so they can shut down
anything "torrent", "rapid" or, indeed, "share".

~~~
tomjen3
That doesn't matter -- it was already illegal in first place.

But the copyrightholders are the only ones who have the ability to make it
legal -- but they have made their choice.

------
basil101
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.

------
frederickcook
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.

[1] <http://blog.twitter.com/2012/01/tweets-still-must-flow.html>

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bluetshirt
Sorry, this web font doesn't render well at low sizes and makes the article
difficult to read.

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nathanpc
True story... Here in Brazil I can't even buy digital music from Amazon.

------
gasull
Add Spotify to the list.

~~~
neotorama
most of the cloud music streaming services are not available outside USA. Ahh,
copyright thingy.

~~~
neilparikh
I don't know about other countries, but Rdio [0] is available in Canada. Which
is interesting, since they have licensing agreements with the four major
labels.

[0]- <http://www.rdio.com/>

The list of countries where Rdio is available is here -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rdio> (first sentence)

~~~
rodh257
they just launched in australia, and unfortunately they seem to have a
fraction of the library the US version does. Slowly getting there though. Zune
Pass is here as well.

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jsavimbi
This tweet is not available in your country.

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erhanharm
Thanks

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Roritharr
Please change the font of your content. It's painful to read... try
font.ubuntu.com for instance.

------
moe
Sorry, this comment is not available in your country.

