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Apple's Terms No Longer Allow ITMS Purchases Outside of US
JasonDT writes "I just accepted the new terms of service for iTunes and found that I will no longer be allowed to access US iTunes outside of the United States. This may seem like no big deal but, I am a US citizen living abroad and I regularly purchase and view TV and movies from AppleTV. Not to mention US citizens just traveling abroad. Does anyone know if this has been enforced or have themselves been affected by this?"
Register itunesproxy.com before apple does!!!
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Is Canada included in that?
I bet that the poster of this article is exploring his options, after all, he's not allow to purchase his media legally, so perhaps he would be better served by a free alternative?
I am sure Apple did it only to make someone else happy (labels, investors, foreign governments, us government, etc...) however, it's ridiculous to suggest that this will do anything but increase piracy.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Use torrents: itunes.anywhere not needed.
not where you were born. When I was an American living and working in Germany, I was subject to the laws of Germany. I couldn't download a browser with more than 40-bit encryption at the time due to export regulations. Yes I was an American citizen, but I wasn't in the united states.
Now, if you are working on behalf of the US government at a diplomatic consulate/mission or in the military, then you may have a gripe, and I believe Apple should do something to work with you. Especially if your billing is to an APO address.
Just because I'm american and we are allowed the freedom of speech inside the US doesn't mean I can have a copy of Mein Kampf in Germany.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Similarly, Australians traveling overseas cannot access (their money in) the Australian iTunes store. Don't feel special.
Welcome to the dismantling of the internet. If you have the slightest knowledge of how media cartels work, not just American ones but World wide, then you know it was just a matter of time before market segmentation reared its ugly head onto the web. Google is not exempt either, they've been IP filtering their early days.
As a deployed American soldier (Afghanistan) who has downloaded many songs from Itunes over the last year, I just have to say this change is ridiculous! That is all.
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
SSH to a friends machine, and tunnel all of your traffic.Then you'd technically be purchasing in the US, right?
I live in Vietnam and regularly purchase apps for my iPhone which, uh, has gained the ability to work here ;).
I saw the warning too but short of setting up some sort of proxy I have no other options but to try and use it here. Fortunately it works (for now).
This has nothing to do with being an USA citizen and all about where you are geographically located. If you have a credit card registered to a USA address, then you can buy quite happily from the US store (Apple isn't going to know the real story), but not if you have a non-USA address. This policy has been in place since day 1 of the iTunes store, and is in place because of the distribution rights set in place by the record companies, so in reality this is a non-story.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
What do you have to say about Apple's warm and fuzzy user-friendly DRM now?
"Well, at least you can always burn it to CD then re-rip it..."
Anyone have a pool going for how long Apple will stay afloat after the rapidly
deteriorating Jobs shuffles off this mortal coil?
This policy is not new. It has been around for at least a year. But I live outside the US (and I am a US citizen... not that it matters in this case) and I still regularly purchase and download and watch TV shows and movies on iTunes. In fact, it is the only software that lets me do this. Amazon and other alternatives disable their service outside the US.
Try out Amazon MP3.
It's cheap, DRM-less, and easy. Plus, it runs on Linux just fine (32-bit has packages, force it on 64-bit, use getlibs, and it works fine).
YEARwithoutDRM
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Google is not exempt either, they've been IP filtering their early days.
That's amazing! Are they using some kind of time-traveling firewall?
The last time I was presented with the "agreement" for the iTunes store, I pulled up a terminal and ran wc on it. It was 4,931 words long, not including referenced agreements. You can go buy a CD at a store with out signing a contract, much less one nearly 5,000 words long.
It contained all manor of claims of how Apple could unilaterally change the terms for purchased music and required that you "agree to agree" to future terms.
Having taken some contract law courses ( but IANAHPAADL - I am not a highly paid Apple attack dog lawyer), much of it seemed unconscionable. Specifically, consideration from Apple (ability to play already purchased songs, access the store, etc.) seems weak-to-non-existent in light of the fact that it can be arbitrarily revoked according to the terms.
Also, I am generally an Apple fan, but this is one area where I think they are really out of control.
AFAIK, Apple will allow you to purchase from the US store if you have credit card with a US or APO billing address. That's how they check.
Also, I'm pretty sure the ToS for the store has had this rule ever since it was opened up to other countries. Each country has its own store due to licensing restrictions from the labels.
It's cheap, DRM-less, and easy. And it doesn't install a helper application into your browser, just waiting for someone to figure out how to slide an exploit into a ".amz" file.
For Safari under Leopard, to remove that erroneous tagging of ".amz" as "safe" (there's no such thing as a "safe" file), remove the entry from ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist .
OT, but your sig is slightly wrong. It should read: "I agree with 90% of the world which are all idiots, you don't, therefore you're biased!"
That is better, but you should take it one step further and translate it into something humans can understand.
Seriously, it needs a diagram accompanying it.
Just get mp3's from the internet for free.
It's the *sensible* thing to do when faced with ridiculous obstacles to what is a simple problem.
ProxyProxyProxyProxyProxyProxyProxy I use OpenVPN it just runs happily in the background allowing me to access Hulu and all kinds of other US only content.
I'm a US citizen, living in Canada.
I have a Canadian iPhone, but cannot purchase anything from iTMS using my US credit card, even using my Canadian address. I don't have a Canadian credit card, making buying anything impossible.
So when I went to the states, I used my US credit card and US address, and I could purchase apps. I went back, synced, and a mysterious error appeared not letting me load the application. Translation of message: "Unable to load application"
No idea if it's the same for music, because I would never buy music from Apple.
When the iTMS first came into existence, I was so eager to use it that I borrowed my aunt's credit card (who lives in the states) and bought music in Canada through her and her credit card! Aaahh... those were the days...
A friend of mine ordered the MLB.TV video streaming package, then had to spend most of the baseball season in China. After he tried unsuccessfully to use the service, he contacted MLB.TV's tech support, and although 1st layer support was no help, he eventually worked his way up to someone who was able to grant him access.
Obviously, since Apple doesn't own the music, they might be less flexible. Doesn't cost anything other than time to try.
I had two iTunes gift cards each worth $15 from Christmas. The iTunes app wouldn't let me use them, because I'm trying to use them in Europe. When I had calmed down over their stupidity, I decided to use a public proxy. Problem solved.
Stupid Apple. I was going to start buying from them now that they had DRM-free songs but not any more. They go from stupid (for DRM) to smart (for DRM-free) and back to stupid (for just being stupid and not letting their users give them money).
My family abroad buys gift cards and uses those to buy from the US iTunes. Works like a charm.
I'm curious: if you go traveling and neglect to authorize your machine before leaving the US, do the new rules prevent you from authorizing while on the road, or is it just that you can't buy new songs?
If you can't authorize, that's worse, because it means that not only can't you purchase, you can't even listen to what you've already paid for. Furthermore, it suggests that someone who moves long term is at real risk of losing access to their whole library.
If you have another mac in the USA, enable remote ssh logins into it. (Or really, any server that accepts ssh, but since you fell for the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field, I'll assume you're on a mac, and you know others with macs in the USA).
In terminal,
ssh -D 1080 example.com
In network preferences,
Configure your network settings to use a socks proxy on 127.0.0.1:1080
Now, Safari and iTunes both will be browsing *via* example.com, working around any geolocation features Apple and other companies may be using. This setting is principally only honored by Apple apps; it won't affect Firefox for example (though you can configure Firefox to use a socks proxy).
Good, Fast, Cheap - Pick any two. - RFC 1925
It would seem that the rabid free info crowd continues to miss the point of these type of restrictions. It's actually the TV people that need this restriction.
TV shows have value to a broadcaster based on the fact that you can sell advertising during a popular show for more than an unpopular one. If there is a commercial free alternative that value is lost and the TV production company/studio/rightsholder can no longer demand a price for the content.
This is a simple attempt to keep the value of their content as high as possible and make as much money as possible.
I don't blame them, I'd want to keep the value of my property as high as possible as well. Most of you would too I presume.
Now I'm going to get blasted by a half million unreasonable and anti copyright idiots and I expect that. You have your opinion and I'm free to ignore it as are the people trying to make a living off of their intellectual property.
But the fact remains that if you want "free" content you have to endure commercials and as long as that is true these people will do what they can to maintain the value of the show to which the commercials will be added.
Of course if you would simply rather pay a fee and have your TV commercial free you can always do what the BBC does. Or better yet the state can run and control all the content so that pesky commercial entities don't have any control of the message.
But wait, we have a barn and a TV camera and we can sing...
Why bother
We Canadians have always known that this is the case. We have this Canadian content law up here (from your friends at the CRTC). I have an iPod Touch and decided that I wanted to put the latest software on it from Apple so I could use the App Store. I re-flashed the firmware (it was jailbroken) because I actually want to support these guys and the App Store is pretty cool. I bought a gift card for this very purpose. I hate putting tons of little transactions on my credit card. So I get the card and go home and download some apps and find it has not charged my gift card. Thinking there must have been some mistake I buy a game I wanted. Same thing. It went through but billed my cc.
I had to go to Apple Support to find out that due to some weird-ass law that we have up here it is not legal to purchase software over the internet by means of a pre-paid medium. That means you CANNOT use your gift card to buy apps, although it works fine for movies or TV, such as it is up in Canada (the TV shows are damned awful to choose from). But the main gripe is I would never have bought this stupid card had I know this in advance. I looked and looked on Apple's site. The only thing I could find that suggested this was the case was forum posts from other frustrated users. Needless to say I was pissed and jail broke my ipod again.
iTunes stores are all over the world. So what if the EULA says you cant buy in the US store if you're in Sweden, use the Swedish iTunes store.
Well if you can't pay to see their shows, they don't lose sales if you pirate them, right? http://eztv.it/
I just tried and American iTunes Store is still not blocked in Europe at least. I somehow fail to see that I'm doing something criminal when I buy music and shows from American iTunes using "gift cards", instead of pirating the goods from a torrent site, which would have been the only viable alternative.
In German you are subject to the laws of Germany. However in many cases it seems that being an "American Citizen" means that if you are in Germany but do something that's illegal in the US (maybe not in Germany), they may still come after you when you come home...
So why don't these companies want the money being offered to them?
The do want your money, but they want more of it depending on where you live. So (in $USD) they might want to charge you $1.00 in the US, $1.50 in Canada, $0.10 in Thailand, and $0.15 in China. Because few people in Thailand or China are going to pay $1.00 for a song, but if it's too low in say, Canada, it would supposedly undercut CD sales.
I don't know if it differs for the iPod, but with the iPhone I can use the apps store or the third-party repositories (Cydia).
The biggest problem with this is for those of us who are US citizens living in US territories. We use US currency, we pay federal taxes, we get our mail through the US post office, but because we are territories and not part of the Mainland US we get screwed on so many different services. Itunes, Netflix, ebay, try ordering any software with even the smallest bit of encryption on it through Amazon in the territories and see the order fail to go through. try getting digital downloads from most places and they will refuse the order because US territories are considered international destinations and are not eligible for those services. It's very frustrating, to have to find a creative way around this problem, usually I have stuff drop shipped to a friend or family stateside and then mailed down here but that doesn't work for digital stuff.
Play.com and 7digital, cheap (cheaper than iTunes+ IIRC), DRM-less, doesn't require any shop specific software. Just a browser and MP3 player. So nothing for an attacker to exploit apart from the software you already had.
Hm. So do you think there's any chance they will refund my outstanding store credit? I still have ~70 USD of gift card credit left over from Christmas. Is that just forfit?
Studios want to keep control over where their TV shows are shown. In particular, they often have exclusive deals with different local distributors in each country (eg. I think Warner Brothers distribute BBC stuff in the US). These studios don't want Apple competing with their distributors. Not much Apple can do about it.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I can order CDs, DVDs, you name it, from amazon.com and they will happily ship things to Canada.
I can't buy the same music/shows online due to 'copyright issues'.
Why is it that the physical media is treated differently from the electronic media for the exact same content?
-- the cake is a lie
I always try to get my media through a legitimate source first, for example I'll watch TV shows with ads on one of the official sites if available. But I've gotten to the point where if I encounter any bullshit I just go get it via some other source and that means copyright infringement.
I do want to support the content creators, but I'm just so tired of waiting for them to get with the program. I can't believe that sites like hulu can only offer the last few episodes of the show... where is the logic in that? I'm not paying for DRM'd material either. It's like they're actively trying to make life more difficult for their customers.
I have some ethics, but they've slipped to the point where I'm willing to infringe copyright if there's no convenient way for me to get the goods. The longer they do stupid shit like this to maintain "control" the more people are going to slip away.
he apple apologists need to seriously STFU with this "it isn't apple's fault!" nonsense. They're partners. Apple is not some holy child that hath cometh down from the mountain to bestow upon the unwashed masses all that is holy and good.
I'd tell you to a heaping spoonful of STFU yourself, but I think you've done Apple enthusiasts everywhere a service by serving as a quintessential example of knee-jerk Apple Critic. You certainly don't know what you're talking about with regards to how the DRM works, you seem to be ignorant of Apple's actions and stated intentions with regard to said DRM, you seem to have reflexively confused licensing issues with DRM issues, and you seem generally confused about the value and state of other players in the marketplace.
Exhibit A:
"Bought that song on your computer at work? Want to listen to it on your computer at home? Well guess what, charlie, unless you find some obscure bullshit setting in some hidden window in some far off corner of some far off menu in iTunes, $1 more shall go to the Steve."
Anyone who's ever used iTunes on more than a single computer knows there's a simple solution to this problem. It doesn't involve an obscure menu, in fact, iTunes will *prompt* you for the necessary information as soon as you try to play the song.
Exhibit B:
A moments of thought would reveal that the geographic restrictions on purchases have little to do with DRM and everything to do with licensing, since DRM (on music anyway) isn't tied to a region, and isn't the technology used in restricting the purchase at any rate.
Exhibit C:
"Why do you think people don't use amazon?"
They do, actually. Their MP3 store launched a year and a half ago and sell about 10% of what iTunes does. Some estimates place them as the #2 digital retailer:
http://mashable.com/2008/03/26/amazon-mp3-takes-2/
Furthermore, that figure almost certainly represents sales mostly taken from iTunes. Almost every iPod/iTunes user I know has switched.
Exhibit D:
"Or why microsoft's VASTLY superior subscription model is ignored?"
I can see value in a subscription model, I've participated in Rhapsody and Satellite Radio before. But at the end of the day, many people -- apparently more people -- happily choose ownership of their selection of media rather than ongoing rent to access to a broader selection, so it's not particularly clear that it's a vastly superior model.
Overall, it appears that the purpose of your post is really to express some ill-defined anger at Apple as a company or to project a straw-man image of people who buy and enjoy their products.
It certainly isn't to express well-considered criticism of some of the company's practices.
Tweet, tweet.
should be noted while this is likely illegal under BOTH USA and EU/EC laws (a friend of mine who is a international trade/patent lawyer in a major Brussels firm says it is so) Apple has good lawyers. Probably Apple knows it eventually will have to back off this but risked anyways. While the probability of a class action is quite high the TIME it takes to bring it to full resolution it fairly long, long enough for Apple to rack enough DOUBLE profits (it may be worthwile unless people massively switch to OTHER devices and illegally convert iTunes to mp3) me thinks this is going to be a BIG MESS...
This has been in the TOS for a very long time and they don't enforce it. Many Canadians were buying US iTMS gift cards and using them with a US account before Apple put movies and TV shows on the Canadian store.
I used to work for an online vido media distribution company, and I suspect that this has very little to do with apple policies, and everything to do with the copyright holder. While small video distributors will often grant all-inclusive licenses, large distributors (sony, disney, a&e, probably anyone you've ever heard of) distribute rights on a per-region basis. These formulas have been developed by the large media distributors in this country over the last 100 years in order to maximize revenue. Having spoken to sony on the matter, it is unlikely that any online distributor of their media, for example, will not be bound by region restrictions. To the gentleman that commented that the CD store did not enforce this same model: This is true, but when you move into DVD's it isn't. This revenue model by the big distributors was specifically what lead to region encoding in the DVD standard. (Yes, I know there are multi-region DVD's.) In short, this is probably not apple's fault, and pretty much every online distributor of major studio content will have to abide by it, unless the revenue models of the content producers shift dramatically. Going to another platform, or another distributor, is unlikely to change this situation fundamentally.
This is nothing new. The US Apple and iTunes stores have always required a USD credit card with a US statement address. (In fact, most US-based internet stores do if you want to get the USD price.) As long as you have those, then you can use the US Apple stores - I do, and I am in the UK. Contrast this with the practices of (and I pick a name at random) Abercrombie and Fitch, which is so scared of a price comparison between its US stores and its UK ones that it blocks access to its US online stores from overseas.
You don't lose the music -- Microsoft knows full well their DRM is cracked. Their DRM is purely for show and to appease the music labels. And for that matter so is Itunes if you use a record through sound card sort of software. So the MSFT model is MUCH better because it is ACTUALLY as much music as I care to record for a monthly fee.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
I just use a VPM [witopia.net] as long as it tunnels out of a US server some times it comes out via Europe though depends on server load.
This is nothing new. Rarely these days can you actually buy something without a US billing address on your credit card (unless you can use PayPal, and even then...) Even stupid places like Target won't let you use your foreign billing address even if you ship within the US. Maybe you want to send it as a legitimate gift? Nooooo!
That's why I kept my US credit card (luckily I have a US shipping address too but these days, now I have to deal with those dumb airline baggage fees- whole other topic of disgust).
I suspect this is also driven by the credit card companies who claim it's due to fraud... Though I wonder how much of this is also due to inadequate measures dealing with identity theft and credit profiling (ie. stalking your transactions because no one would ever use their credit card outside the US *insert sarcasm here*).
I just rented "Burn after Reading" from here in Switzerland. Maybe they payed Apple off with nazi gold. But I do use a US credit card with a US billing address, so perhaps the OP was a bit misinformed about being restricted while traveling abroad. Maybe only non US-based accounts will be cut off.
I am a British citizen living in Australia. I have a British bank account with a British credit card but registered to my Australian address. All perfectly fine. But I can't and never have been able to download music from the UK iTMS with this card. But neither can I use this card to purchase from the Australian iTMS, even though I can go into any store selling physical CDs and use the same card to buy a CD. Most other online purchases (but not all) accept this card without a murmur. This whole "credit card tied to a physical region of the planet" thing is stupid, broken, and out of step with the reality of more and more people being globally mobile.
It's the same mentality that brought us the ever-baffling wonder of user hostility that is DVD region coding.
Prorietry lock-in FTL! But then again, what do you expect from a company that produces a device that can only play a tiny subset of the audio codecs. Yet another example of Form Over Function Fail. Any portable musioc device that cannot natively play my OGG or FLAC files isn't worth the trouble.
Actually, I got the message that iTMS was not to be used from outside of the US months ago (I live in Japan). They said they might check. Thus far, they haven't. I wouldn't worry about it.
Also, Amazon MP3 won't sell to me anymore, although they do for my friends. I had to buy a book for work from the US site and registered my Japanese credit card (my work can only reimburse expenditures made in yen), and then, like magic, Amazon MP3 stopped working. I've even tried making a new account with a different US credit card, and yet Amazon now knows I'm in Japan, but doesn't know that my buddy down the street, who has only ever used his US credit card with the US site, is as well.
I absolutely hate pirating music. I reject it on ethical grounds, and I hate tracks being mis-labeled (I have never entered track names by myself--who are these people who can't spell who are entering ID3 tags on pirated songs???) and having no control over the bitrate I get, and the album art requiring looking and futzing... It's just a shitty way to get music for all involved.
But when I'm not even allowed to buy it online (except for on CD--which I still do for music I really, really like, so I can rip it lossless), what's a boy to do?
The world was looking so pretty, without all those borders... Why do companies and governments need to redraw them through technological means? The promise of the internet is being quashed everywhere you look...
If people actually tried something before posting. The terms have said this for a while (and they only say that for US accounts.. my Japanese ITMS account of course says I should only use it in Japan).
As other posters have mentioned, this is just to make the labels happy.
AND... it works fine. I can buy and download all manner of iTunes content from Japan or the US on either account. They use the BILLING ADDRESS to verify where you live, so as long as you have a valid US credit card, you're fine. If you think about it, that method makes sense - because if you have a US card, you must have some connection with the US.
In the worst case if they tried to do some crappy inaccurate IP-based blocking, you could just proxy it. I hardly think this is a "Oh I couldn't buy it legally, that's why I illegally downloaded 30,000 tracks" type excuse.
Who wants to pay a fee each and every month to listen to music, only to lose all their music should they stop paying?
That would be me.
I have an account with the Rhapsody online music service. For about $12 a month, I have access to over five million audio tracks. Five. Million.
Now, I would be the last person to claim that they are five million good audio tracks; there are plenty of lame covers and there is plenty of just music I hate. But that still leaves a vast amount of stuff I like, and I'm having fun exploring my way around. Recently I have been listening to the entire back catalog of Alan Parsons Project music; I found a few gems and a bunch of stuff I don't care about. Without buying anything, I figured out which songs I actually would want to get on a best-of compilation album.
I still buy CDs and I still buy music from Magnatune. But there is a place for music exploration using Rhapsody and Pandora.
If I wanted to be snide, I could comment that ITMS is vastly inferior to Rhapsody because you must pay a buck just to hear the whole song to find out whether it's worth buying or not. But why should we bash each others' preferences? There is plenty of room for both types of music service.
The worst thing about Rhapsody: buggy software. Really buggy. Maybe the Windows client is better, but I never use that.
The best thing about Rhapsody: Five. Million. Audio tracks.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Did the other half go into the bay, and that is considered a good start?
Another example is The Daily Show, I love watching that even when it is a lame episode with nothing good happening, it advertises "buy this episode you just watched for free on iTunes!!!!111!!!!" at the very end of the credits, but TDS is not on any other version of iTunes apart from the American store apparently! So I cant! I actually would be willing to pay a dollar or maybe two for cherry picked episodes, but I cant! Its not like there are dvd sets or something either, so if I wanted episodes, Im just meant to download dvr recrorded versions from bit torrent etc? We dont get The Corbert Report, I have gotten some audio books of Corbert, and I would consider buying those two since its not on NZ TV, but its unavailable. Really, any kind of regional restriction should not be tolerated in the internet age, imagine if you could only talk to people in your country by email for example.
---
I would think setting up a headless box within the US controlled via VNC for iTunes purchases by another machine running outside the region would be enough to get around this, assuming the out of region machine was also authorized with itunes ahead of time on the same account for playback. Then all you'd have to figure out is a method of transfer.
If your ISP has a fit about it, I hear pen drives are fairly easy to ship...
8==8 Bones 8==8
More and more content providers based in the United States block users with an IP outside the USA... I live on Vancouver Island (Canada), and can literally see the Washington State's Olympic Mountains from my house... but I cannot even log in to Rhapsody (let alone subscribe), or any videos at (for example) Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show or Colbert Report.
These idiots just don't get it -- I think we're going to have to wait for all the baby-boomer lawyers to die off and be replaced by younger attorneys.
That is not news.
They've been doing that since the beginning. I'm in Russia and I can't buy a song from iTunes USA. And there's no iTunes Music Store in Russia either.
Eugene 'HMage' Bujak
If only they made cannabis legal to own/grow/smoke, but not to sell/buy.
But obvious free solutions are just not compatible with govt suit lawyers who made 250k yearly.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
No judge or tax man can proove you have to pay income tax by law, they cannot site the laws, they just say
"you have to, pay it, we have guns and can kill you and your family and fake a murder suicide like we have done lots of times"
Just leave usa, like 150k californians have already because of high taxes. No senator pays taxes, or any corporate, so why should us cerfs.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Asia has dirt cheap beer and hookers and lady boys
Those execs and singers can buy cocaine anywhere, any time, no DRM or restrictions. Sales tax free too.
I have a relative who's retired and who has been living in various developing countries while he travels. It wasn't until he started doing this that I realized how much of a PITA that the Internet can be for people outside the US and North America. There are all kinds of artificial, often copyright-related barriers. If you want to get TV shows at Hulu.com, tough luck. Need to download games via Direct2Drive.com? Tough. Any kind of media is hard to come by, to the point where he and I are willing to put up with the outrageous customs charges when I ship him DVDs.
Cripes. This is old stuff. Ever since ITMS started, you couldn't register an account with it in the USA unless you had a USA issued credit card with a USA billing address. I life in Japan but all of my CC's are issued by USA banks, so Apple refuses me. Likewise, ITMS Japan refuses me because all of my CC's are issued by USA banks, not Japanese banks. So I don't buy downloaded music. Instead, I rent CDs from the Video/CD store which works out to about 30 cents a track.
Literally two minutes before seeing this story, I downloaded a song to try one of their weekly freebies. I'm in Japan for work for the last couple of years, and from the beginning until now, had no troubles downloading. When I fired up iTunes 3 minutes ago, it gave me the standard spiel it gives when terms have changed. I skimmed through it and Ok'd it.
I didn't realize it had such a time bomb in there. And, from the looks of it, it doesn't matter, yet.
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
this reminds me of when I try to get stuff from the BBC. they will not let me watch many trailers, videos etc. because I live in America and have to what until they release it through BBC America. I agree that these policy do lead to more piracy.