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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I'd expect part of the problem is that these are multi-national companies. Even if the box is in America, the office overseas could be targeted for legal action.
Well, one option is to make it illegal to discriminate based on nationality. This is the approach taken in the European Union, you are simply not allowed to give a different deal to someone from another EU country (with an exception for cars, that the Germans managed to sneak in). It is not enforced everywhere yet, but several good things have come out of it.
You could conceivably make similar rules on the UN or WTO level. The only ones hurt would be Hollywood and large multinationals. Which is why it will never happen.
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.