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jelmerdejong.com

186 pointsjelmerdejong69 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

Yes it would — except, apparently, under Hollywood logic.

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.

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.

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.

>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?

Sorry, I downvoted you by mistake :|

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.

I live in Australia, and a HUGE amount of marketing is done for new US shows that they think will go well in Australia.

For example New Girl has had constant promotion for months, while Homeland has only had mild promotion.

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

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.

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

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...

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

You may find this interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Us_reg_dc_2872.JPG

Yes, that is the standard DC license plate.

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.

It could be argued that the moral, political, social, and economical repercussions of not having political representation are far more expensive than the cost of federal taxes. Right now about 46% of Puerto Rican voters would happily make that trade.

You can definitely watch Hulu in Puerto Rico. I am watching it right now on another window and I am not using any kind of proxy. However, some time ago they did have some configuration issues that made Hulu identify Puerto Rico as a foreign country, but only sometimes. I can only assume that different content delivery systems were configured differently. Fortunately, fixing the problem was just a matter of refreshing the browser a few times.

But this artificial distinction between the USA and Puerto Rico is pretty harmful to the island because while Puerto Rico is bound by the trade regulations of the USA it doesn't get to enjoy many of its businesses and services. And this puts us at a significant and needless disadvantage.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Take a look at game prices and its much the same thing: ~$50USD for USA, ~$100USD for Australia.

This is even common for digital download games (steam etc).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

It was extremely hard on my eyes, I had to try zooming into and out of the page to get to something I could sort of read if I squinted.

It's just too fine on Chrome/Firefox on Windows. Looks okay on IE, though.

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

Yes. My iPad didn't render the "d"s properly. I thought it was a kind of clever "see what it's like when you don't get everything" trick. Disappointed that it wasn't...:)

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.

Vie?

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.

That's the whole point. Why pirate it when non-US residents are willing (and shall) pay for it? This whole restriction thing just doesn't make sense from a business perspective.

No sir we don't want any money from the other 6.7 billion people outside the USA!

> 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".

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.

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.

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

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

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

Add Spotify to the list.

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

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)

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.

Last.fm seems to work without work arounds.

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

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