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Licensing Issues Shut Down Pandora Outside US
randalotto writes "I'm in France for the summer and have been listening to Pandora at work. I tried logging on tonight and was greeted with a surprising message: 'We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the US. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative. ... The pace of global licensing is hard to predict, but we have the ultimate goal of being able to offer our service everywhere.' I'm not sure what the deal is or what licensing requirements suddenly changed, but Pandora in France is no more..." Note: the above link redirects to the main site, for those inside the US.
Hope.
I thought they shut down listening to non-USA last year ?
...err, I mean. Isn't this old news?
I though Europe was blocked 2 years or so earlier. Didn't know that France was an exception. Or he was lucky with his IP block being considered American.
I lost my sig.
Hasn't this been the case for quite a while now?
I live outside of the US, and I haven't been able to access pandora for more than a year (maybe even more).
I haven't tried in a while, but I used to use Pandora a lot till it randomly stopped working, with that exact same error message in 2006. I live in New Zealand if anyone cares...
If you get it though a tunnel/proxy server will it work.
IMHO the effectiveness of location based filtering/blocking is inversely proportional to the l33tness of you users.
It sounds like you are over their for some school/work related thing. Both of those institutions commonly provide VPN service.
It's been like this for months, if I remember.
On what sort of legal/copyright grounds (this time) would cause the shutdown of Pandora outside the U.S.? I thought the whole beauty and logical design of Pandora to make the streaming legit was the idea of the played music being based on the donated full, legit, and tangible music CDs they received from the community or public domain? I guess long live free recreational drug use in Europe; just won't be able to stream Paul Oakenfold anymore while doing it.
Just pick a VPN provider with a server in the US and location-based discrimination is a thing of the past.
Here's a decent list:
http://en.cship.org/wiki/VPN
It's funny how "content rights" holders complain about all those evil people copying, when you cannot even do it their-way(TM) if you want to.
So you could listen to Pandora in France until just recently? Interesting. I haven't been able to access Pandora in close to two years (I'm in Australia). I thought they barred all other countries simultaneously several years ago. But apparently not ... they must have been able to reach some interim agreement to continue to operate in France/EU that they couldn't do here.
Anyway, I recently started working at a company with US-based offices, which allows me to choose to VPN in to the US. Pandora works for me via that method, which is nice. But prior to getting that job yeah, I had to do without Pandora for 18 months which made me sad :(
The whole thing doesn't surprise me though. I'm not familiar with how copyright law in the US works, but it seems that virtually all US-based streaming media sites do this. E.g. most American TV stations websites have streaming video, but if you try and access it outside America, you get a "sorry, cannot display this content to IPs outside the US" message. Same with services like Hulu.
By comparison though, when I travel overseas I can access most Australia streaming radio stations/TV sites (for instance, JJJ radio, ABC's downloadable shows, my local commercial radio stations) from outside Australia. Must just be a difference in the law I guess. It must piss off Americans who are abroad though, when they try and tune in to their local stations over the net to get some news from home, and get denied.
alternative: www.jango.com works fine (at least from Italy)
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
The Pandora service stopped 1..2 years ago here in South Africa, and Last.fm in April this year - Not like we can afford the bandwidth in this place anymore...
Anything that exposes the atrocity of copyright law to the average person can only produce some great blowback. Just like all the youtube takedowns. And many are already getting pissed about not being able to copy their DVDs to their mp3 players. Bring it on! Eventually we will vote you out!
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
It seems like there's a billion of these companies now. All of them somehow able to create a playlist based on your previous likes or dislikes.
Finetune from what I've heard is a ton better than Pandora, but I don't keep track of either of them.
As of 2007, Finetune was available outside the US where Pandora wasn't. http://lifehacker.com/234553/finetune-pandora+like-internet-radio
Things may have changed though.
does not foster technological and cultural innovation
ip law is an impediment to technological and cultural innovation
it has hopelessly been compromised by government agendas and corporate greed, and no longer serves individual innovators and creators
it is your moral duty to ignore ip law, or better, destroy it
i hope to see in my lifetime the complete neutralization of any effective ip law in this world. the internet makes it possible to route around the damage that is ip law, things like the pirate party in europe gives us hope as social opinion moves in line with obvious morality on the issue of the complete bankruptcy of ip law
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And they wonder why sites like the TPB are so popular. :rolls_eyes:
A friend of mine is a long time Pandora user and he hasn't stopped when Pandora blocked everyone outside the US. Currently he says Tor helps. If I'm not mistaken, he's using a Tor/FoxyProxy combination but I haven't delved too much into it. I don't feel like hassling with something if there's an easier, equally good, solution. So now I'm listening to music via GrooveShark. FineTune, Deezer and other services are also available but most are annoying and anti-users, unlike GrooveShark. I admit, Pandora probably has the best song matching algorithms and GrooveShark's database is quite a mess but it does what it's suppose to do and short of quite obscure albums, I've found everything I wanted.
No one ever said being a Heretic was easy.
Let us meet again in "Less Interesting Times"
Does anyone have a working link, for those of us who are in the US?
The doesn't affect me much, really -- Pandora still works fine for me as long as I'm in the US. But it's inspiring to me to read about the new and interesting in which American companies find to conspire against other countries.
So - I want to read the note. Someone post it, archive it, or something, so we USians can start arguing about who to boycott next.
Kid-proof tablet..
Pandora is blocking acccess to non US listeners for years.
I live in Belgium and I get this message for 2 years now.
Sure looks like it was designed for Americans, even if it's not available here. I don't feel like lining up a foreign VPN right now (maybe if they mentioned where it is available). Anyone have experience with it? What makes it so great?
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Try slacker.com, not sure if it works outside the US.
No biggie. The only thing you'll find is a bearded clam...
It's been this way for at least a year in France - I arrived in October of 2008, and was greatly disappointed to learn that my Pandora days were over. :(
You are in France or Europe ? Then, you shall give a try to Deezer as a cool alternative : http://www.deezer.com/
Don't worry, Pandora.
Users outside the U.S. can mostly just download songs without fearing the RIAA.
And then they can listen to the EXACT songs they want to.
and this is OLD news.
So, this is how RIAA is going to combat piracy? It's the same with Spotify, if you're not UK or Swedish bound you can still register through a proxy, but the problem is, after using it for a while from your native country it starts whining.
I guess the only solution is to obtain and constantly use proxy servers in order to route around this?
Unfortunately, this isn't news. I haven't had access to Pandora since I can't remember. It's amazing how licensing only works in their favor. I have 200 CDs in America-- which according to the RIAA I only license-- and yet can't listen to them here because somehow it's illegal. Sigh...
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
It used to be that a musician would either play on the street corner for tips, be hired to play live, or would be commissioned to compose a piece of music. Mozart never policed his fans to make sure they didn't hum his tunes without tossing him a few coins.
Moot point though, it's the recording industry who isn't being paid here, not the musicians. I know plenty of musicians who make a fine living playing gigs, and from what i understand most rockstars make more money on concerts anyways.
They did this like two years ago! Either none of the /. editors knew or they forgot about it entirely.
Yeah it sucks to live in Canada for some things, Hulu too is happy to laugh in our face along with pretty much any 'convenient' or 'desirable' online method for watching TV shows. Pandora was GREAT while I was able to listen to it, very cool way to find new music, then I'm not allowed anymore because someone in a suit figured it wasn't a good idea to let Canadians (or anyone else) keep the happy status quo and that music was a bad thing to share.
Such a frustrating state of affairs for U.S. Citizens alone having to deal with complicated or over-the-top IP law in their own country let alone other people in other countries having to deal with the shitstorm that Copy"rights" are and Digital "Rights" management are as well.
When the technology exists to do something, people are going to want it and are going to take advantage of that new opportunity. Years ago back when dinosaurs ruled the land and the idea of a flat screen TV was still the twinkle in some engineer's eye... the only way to watch a show was to be there when it was on TV. That was it. Oh I guess you could buy the VHS box set but that would just be throwing money away. Nowadays I can click about a half dozen times on two websites and an hour later I can watch an entire series at exactly the pace I want to. This sort of on-demand service is already here and it's ridiculously easy. I can't think of any service or organization in history that, after making things *harder* to do would move on to success and glory.
For some reason I keep thinking about how the Gutenberg printing press made it easier to get a hold of a bible... that didn't exactly make it easier for the church to possess the hearts and minds of their followers, despite insisting that good Christians should not read a now easily accessible bible and instead leave the hard work of figuring out when and where the bible should be read to you to the goodly priests who knew better. After all, free access to knowledge* and information could be *dangerous* (but for whom?)
*Yes yes, I know that free access of information and pirating the latest episode of Desperate Housewives are not exactly the same thing... but I just wanted to rant about Pandora, that was awesome while it lasted :( (After all, we canadians need some hot music to stave off the cold and polar bears. Polar bears hate Queen, did you know? I do.)
This is so old news, has been for years. Welcome to the world outside the US, where we can't legally use almost any media on the net. Glad to see some US-citizens hit by it though.
As a person who used to live in Mexico and now in Japan, i have always encountered these kind of problems and don't get your hopes up, so far i have never EVER seen a service to be available again outside from USA, so that's message could be translated as "Access denied." It sucks as USA have very cool online services which doesn't have counterparts locally.
use spotify
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Can't see south park online or see full episodes of tv shows anywhere. even clips from shows are blocked on some sites like on some shows on Discovery. Can't rent movies on xbox, apple tv etc. There's a few online movie rental sites with a very limited catalog (20-30 movies). Can't get any proper recording boxes(want a record a show when it is available on any channel, and no microsoft media center is not an option)
Really, the best option are a RSS feed from eztv or nzbtv., a NAS(that can download too) and a Popcorn Hour media player. Then you can see the shows you want, when you want it even if they don't broadcast them in your country.
The TV and movie business are repeating the failures of the music industry(at least in scandinavia). I am sick and tired of seeing messages like this everywhere. http://martinklasch.blogspot.com/2008/10/cartoons-sorry-scandinavia.html
I have seen that Discovery Channel now are sending some TV shows without a year or two in delay. For examples shows like mythbusters are only a month behind or something like that.
No Hulu or Pandora in Canada. And so, I use the news groups and torrents.
I don't really get the idea they are after while blocking internet radios, YouTube videos and other services from people outside of US. That's like shooting yourself in a leg. Do i need to go pirate to listen and hear this stuff on them? Seriously, these people should get their heads out of ass already.
In a case of what would be best described as "wtf", I work for a US company in the UK that uses a US based proxy for all web connections. As such I can connect to Pandora which is not available in the "UK" but can not connect to Spotify which is only available in the "UK" in a non-subscription basis.
Obviously the internet cares not about borders so why are companies being forced into ridiculous limitation that are so easily bypassed for the sake of laws invented before human beings even conceived the idea of what eventually became the internet.
Why don't you just simply use Grooveshark?
It's really simple, available for every country and most importantly *free for all*
Oh, and.. don't tell the RIAA about the site, okay? :)
[insert lame sig here]
You can still get the songs using Cabos, torrents, etc. Why does it matter if a single website goes down?
More to the point, the headline should be "Record companies seek to club to death yet another new technology they are scared of, rather than try to embrace it".
In the UK, Spotify is a reasonable alternatiev (I think, never got to use Pandora, but this does much the same thing)
I'm surprised at how many people are missing the point here. Pandora (and Hulu, for that matter) is blocked outside of the US. A number of /. readers are responding with, "Oh, if you're in the UK go here." "In France, you can listen on this site."
It's not (or at least shouldn't be) about what works in this region or that one or the other. It's fundamentally about the misapplication of national boundaries to an international (and nation-neutral) system. The internet restricted by borders is silly and wrongheaded.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The paranoid media industry slowly locks in the only export keeping the US relevant in the World Economy: Media and Entertainment.
Slowly but surely, they'll lock all the media in, patent it to hell, and lock it down to the point where no one can (or will want to) see it, and the US will no longer be the world's entertainment outlet, hollywood will eventually become a joke. Might be a radical call, but this is what they seem to be heading for, licensing the hell out of everything, and licensing themselves into obscurity. Naturally though, they'll survive a little longer by managing to intertwine themselves into our yearly taxes for doing absolutely nothing at all (they have tried this in the past, including trying to get money from student financial aid to fund themselves) But it will not last long as beyond media exports, we have nothing to offer the rest of the world, the rest of the industrialized world have made themselves run independent of us when it comes to manufacturing, they only rely on us as a consumer economy now, which, will not last.
hopefully future entrepreneurs wake up and start building a new infrastructure that will rise through the ashes of the old one once it fails. The green energy movement is helping in this respect, as tons of new jobs creating new alternatives are springing up, if this doesn't kill off the old dinosaurs, hopefully it will make them adapt and wake up and realize their own mistakes.
GM dying? feh, They arent the only american automobile company, what about all the upstarts for electric and alternative cars? What about Ford? The latter being a company who knew when it was time to wise up where the former didn't.
But either way, let's hope this continues, maybe people will wise up.
Go with Deezer man. It is the best alternative to Pandora that we can find here in France. www.deezer.com
http://www.internetfreedom.org/ ultrasurf works with firefox just tried it
Try the Against Monopoly website. I think technical discussions concerning circumvention are immediately useful, but the long term goal should be to have public discourse on the merits of the copyright system. It's clear from stories like these that the public benefits of a copyright system are significantly outweighed by their costs. The Against Monopoly website has, for me anyway, painted the clearest picture of what is so wrong with IP laws.
You wanted to know how artists are supposed to support themselves without copyrights? Consider that the "First Mover" advantage can be a serious money maker, even without copyright protection. Take the 9/11 Commission report. Before publication, several publishing houses angled for exclusive rights to be the *first* printer and distributor of the book. The text of the report is not copyrighted, yet someone could see the profits waiting for them as the first printer of the report.
To put it entirely differently, copyrights and patents create a tendency for artists, inventors and the corporations that support them, to sit on their laurels instead of finding ways to stay ahead of the pack with innovation. For a book that provides a lucid description of what life could be like without IP, check out "Against Intellectual Monopoly." It's an up to date analysis of how artists and inventors can still make money without intellectual property rights. I highly recommend it for anyone looking for a way to entertain debate on this issue.
Oh, did I mention that the book is free to download?
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
free music over the internet is simply nothing but advertising. this radical system brought to by emulating the almost century-old practice of radio play. money is made in concerts, advertising. for writers, its merchandicing tie ins, book signings, speaking engagements, movie deals, etc. movie houses, btw, survived tv, the vhs, dvd, and the internet, and are stil gaining in profits, and no one is saying you should be able to sneak into a movie theatre for free. hollywood producers just lose their aftermarket dvd revenue streams. boo fucking hoo: hollywood made plenty of cash before the dvd and the vhs... the vhs of course which they fought tooth and nail... before realizing it meant MORE money, not less money for them. meatspace is a finite resource and should be doled out via economic costs, it is genuinely scarce, the number of seats in concert/ theatre. no such scarcity exists with COPYING files. it's not philosophically impossible to steal something by copying it
meanwhile, software writers have been doing fine giving away free software for decades now. ever hear linux? even in the windows world, go to sites like download.com, tucows.com: thousands of vendors giving away free software in order to generate business. they make their money via customization for specific clients. any generalized software is an opportunity to pad your resume and advertise your services and establish yourself as an authority
what is this system called? make up your own mind, but it is vastly superior to trying to do the impossible of policing and filtering the internet and financially blackmailing the few 0.01% of uncareful sharers you do manage to catch
the internet has already killed ip law. all that is happening now is the law, and the uninformed opinion of those like you, having to catch up to the new reality, the new status quo: anything that can be digitized is free. not because i say so, i'm no authority. it just IS free, because of what new technology has made possible. a pimply teenager in his basement in pasadena with broadband has greater distribution power of bertelsmann+time warner+every other publisher in 1980... hey dude in dresden: want every single creative output of an obscure lounge singer in wellington? here ya go. the only catch is: NO ONE CONTROLS THIS, or even can control this. sure they can bankrupt a few poor souls, as if that changes the behavior of millions of teenagers with no spending money and high technical acumen. no army of lawyers can defeat them
its called disruptive technology, and plenty of examples from history exist of new technology coming along and dramatically overthrowing social and legal precedents and establishments. guess what? we still exist as a moral species, we're only richer now for those new technologies. oh darn
what if you don't change your opinion or the law doesn't change? who fucking cares what you think. who fucking cares what i think. its all just damage damage for the internet to route around and do its thing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"How will musicians, writers, movie studios, news organizations, software companies etc even approach covering the costs of producing their work if the first person who buys it can make infinite number of copies and share them with the whole world?"
Newsflash - that's already the case, and probably always will be the case from now on. The companies that are fighting it might as well be fighting against the tide coming in.
In software, which is what I do and know about, the obvious outcome is that software will no longer be sold/licensed per copy. Proprietary software is getting replaced by Free/Open software, and by web-based apps and services. Even with free software, it still takes knowledge and work to put the programs to use, and that is what companies are paying for - the *work*, not the bits themselves.
In music and movies, I don't know. I think we *will* see a big devaluation of pop music and Hollywood film industries. Their prominence is what proves that the previous, pay-per-copy based system was so wrong. Seriously, does it make the slightest bit of sense for a rock star or a movie star to be paid hundreds of times more than a head of state?
Simply put, infinite copying is reality, and companies that can't adapt to it will go under.
I've seen where a CIO allowed our Veritas licenses to expire because the "business" managers said that IT was costing too much money. My team reminded him 3 months in advance of the $200K payment, then more and more until it came to the day prior to the expiration. The primary DB stopped working. The customers, clients, business, marketing, everyone screamed!
$200K freed up that day to deal and a few days later another $200K arrived for other items the CIO had been nagging them about the last few months.
At the time, I thought he was an idiot. Looking back years later, he may have been a genius.
Seriously, just a simple one sentence explanation of what it is might be useful. Why do crap summaries like this get through?
Get Firefox.
Get Tor.
Get the FoxyProxy FF add-on.
Go to Torstat. Select the US CC and click Search. Click the sort buttons (the >) for Running, Fast, Exit, Stable, and Valid. Note down the nodes that come up.
Open your torrc file. At the bottom, add the line
StrictExitNodes 1
And then a line that begins with the word 'exitnodes', a space, and then a comma-separated list of the nodes found earlier. Save. Restart Tor.
Open up Firefox. Click the FoxyProxy status bar in the lower right. Make sure it's on "patterns" mode (the mode selector is at the top). Click the Proxies tab. Double-click the Tor proxy. Click Add New Pattern. For Pattern Name, type Pandora. For URL pattern, type this:
"http://www.pandora.com/*"
Without the quotes. Make sure it has Whitelist and Wildcards selected. Click OK and OK again to get out of the Pandora config.
Access Pandora.
You're welcome.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I hope artists can get a better deal for themselves and increasing availability of channels apart from traditional record companies may give them a better negotiating position. Free market will take care of it.
Radio is not a free market; it is monopolized by FCC licensees. The major record labels have the advantage that they can promote their works on FM broadcast radio. Mobile Internet radio is still cost prohibitive: a typical mobile Internet plan costs $719.88 plus surcharges and tax per receiver per year.
First tried out MeeMix shortly after moving from Halifax to Toronto (early months of 2007), discovering that they'd finally started cracking down on non-US IPs, and saw an ad for it on Facecrook. Here's the thing: MeeMix has some pretty cool interface options that I wish Pandora had. I couldn't give a toss about the social aspects of MeeMix--I don't care who listening to the same bands that I've never met--but I really like their sliding scale of like/dislike of a song. Pandora's very... polar about it. Thumbs up, meh, or die-in-a-fire. I really prefer being able to say anything between "This is awesome, I want to hear more like this", "This is pretty cool, I like it", "I'm not a huge fan, but it's not terrible" and "Seriously?!" before getting to die-in-a-fire. That being said, Pandora's been trained quite well. I have an entire station of nothing but early-to-mid-nineties alt rock (I can listen at work, I don't know why). It's great, it reminds me of when music was good. MeeMix hasn't been trained nearly so well, but they also introduced me to Fluke and Sparta. I say, if you miss Pandora, go with MeeMix. Takes a bit of doing to train it as well as Pandora, but they've got some pretty good stuff in there that might surprise you. And the eleven-point scale of like/dislike (and that doesn't even include the "I never want to hear this again" option) is great. That being said.. I really wish I could get Pandora at home.
Matthew G P Coe
http://mgpcoe.blogspot.com/
I remember trying this website only to realize that what they promised really only worked about 5% of the time. Then I found the light of hypem.com and I never returned to that terrible place...
"You have to bypass the Heisenberg Compensaters to create an inertial sump, then reverse the polarity on the Warp Field Generators, then combine the streams(yes, this time you do!) and reroute the output to the deflector dish to emit a focused tachyon pulse that has to be synchronized and modulated with the inertia compensator's artificial gravity generator, pipe your Tor proxy through that and Lynx then flies at near light speeds down the 'tubes'!"
[rolls eyes and licks lips]: It's almost TOO easy!
aw, crap. Please don't tell me we've patented stupidity.
Many have tried only to stumble when their own stupidity is found to be in violation of their own patent, rendering it invalid.
Her lips were softer than a duck's bill, but her quacks
Has been like this for years in Germany :(
Just get anchorfree's Hotspot shield. It's usually too slow for streaming video, but it's fast enough for streaming audio, and costs nothing.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Try Magnatune. They:
Digital Citizen
this is the shit i am sick of. the internet is global, so regions be damned. license globally or don't fucking play. you are hurting the internets!!
...
Oh well...
If what is being listened to is streaming, there's always Shoutcast Radio. (I like VLC for this, but I'm sure there are others just as good.) I believe there's even portable apps that will let you listen. (So you can use your thumbdrive w/o an install.) Of course you won't necessarily have the same playlist selection feature a website may have had. But some of the people who do shoutcast "stations" are open to email playlist or song requests. Finding a variety station or something that caters to a genre isn't really hard. If you're looking for a playlist by a particular artist, then you may be SOL in that case. (But there are some pirate stations out there that don't give a shit about IP and licensing, and some of them may take requests.)
But then again, if you're working at a place that won't let you run software to listen to shoutcast streams I guess finding another web-based service is your only option. Good luck with the other suggestions.
it has been so for at least three last years.