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Licensing Issues Shut Down Pandora Outside US

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the ministry-of-culture-may-be-pleased dept.

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.

19 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What's left for users outside the U.S.? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://spotify.com/

    After that, pandora feels kinda crappy...

  2. Get a cheap VPN with a US server by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  3. Jango by fph+il+quozientatore · · Score: 5, Informative

    alternative: www.jango.com works fine (at least from Italy)

    --
    My first program:

    Hell Segmentation fault

  4. Re:Doesn't make sense by EvanED · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

    Um, owning a CD is a far cry from having the rights to publicly exhibit/distribute it.

  5. Re:First post! by interactive_civilian · · Score: 4, Informative

    Indeed. This is the primary reason I have never used Pandora and why I did end up using Last.fm. Pandora has never been accessible to me from where I've been in the world. With Last.fm no longer being free to listen on, options are limited, though, if you continue using scrobbling, you can still use Last.fm to find some decent recommendations to check out. Then you can turn to other sources to sample that music.

    Though it isn't the same thing, in that you have no control over what you listen to, I'm going to go ahead and give a shout out to Triple J Radio, a radio station out of Melbourne, Australia that plays a wide range of music and very little top-40 crap.

    If anyone is looking for legal free music, it is worth surfing around Archive.org and/or LegalTorrents. There are a lot of good independent artists out there giving their music away.

    --
    "Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
  6. Re:Old news ? by Goldberg's+Pants · · Score: 4, Informative

    Pandora has been dead outside the US for some time. I was just getting into using it when they shut down access outside the US. I'm sure it was at LEAST two years ago this happened.

  7. TPB...torrents...etc... by AmigaHeretic · · Score: 4, Informative

    And they wonder why sites like the TPB are so popular. :rolls_eyes:

  8. Tor by Sabre+Runner · · Score: 5, Informative

    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"
    1. Re:Tor by EdIII · · Score: 3, Informative

      would it appear that all the requests coming from TOR (terrorist manuals, bestiality, child pornography, and so forth), were actually coming directly from me?

      Absolutely. TOR achieves anonymity through reasonable doubt as to who is responsible for the packets. You are going to be sending out packets on behalf of someone else, and therefore you will be the one they look at, not the originator. The whole point is that they can never prove it was originated by YOU.

      Then, when arrested, my defense would be that it was really coming from the TOR node I was running?

      It's a better defense then you give it credit for. Terrorist manuals are not illegal. It's ridiculous to say that the possession of information is illegal, and it's a very disturbing trend to see people thinking they can get in trouble for it. Bestiality is not illegal either, the pictures I mean.

      Consider this:

      After the 300th arrest of a TOR exit node provider, prosecutors start realizing that there is never any forensic evidence collected off the systems showing actual guilt. The *only* thing the prosecutor has is an expert to call to say the "bad packets" came from the suspect's network. The defendant brings in experts on TOR and explains the "bad packets" never actually originated from his network, but were proxied through from another node and there are no logs.

      Prosecutors are not stupid, and they are most certainly not interested in guilt or innocence. They are whores of the highest degree. If they feel they cannot win a case, they don't even try. They are not like Level 80 Paladins that are going to pursue justice at all costs.

      I am willing to bet that after awhile they will begin checking people to see if they are an exit node FIRST when they suspect them based on "bad packets". If so, they are going to need on heck of a lot more evidence before busting down their doors and seizing equipment when 99.99999999999% of the time they never succeed in convicting anyone. It would not be smart to continue doing that, would it?

      Don't forget the BEST defense of all.............

      "The packets could have never originated from my actions your honor. All of MY packets go through someone else's exit node. 100% of packets that leave my network are originated from other TOR nodes, as that is how it is designed."

  9. Re:Old news ? by nkh · · Score: 2, Informative

    That's funny, I'm in France and I just discovered Last.fm today (yeah, I'm slow...) and the Mac program works great. I don't see any subscription here, maybe it's some kind of free trial. According to their subscription page, I can have "unlimited radio streaming" but it's not written anywhere in their program.

  10. Re:Old news ? by nkh · · Score: 2, Informative

    Woops, small update: Last.fm is limited to 30 tracks only for the free version. I'll try something else...

  11. Re:spotify by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Spotify Free is available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain.
    There are a few more countries where Spotify Premium is available.

    IMO, what makes it great is:
    * 3.5M tracks in the library, growing each day.
    * Slick, easy to use UI
    * 160Kbps Vorbis for users of the free product, 320Kbps Vorbis for premium subscribers

    Another thing you might be interested in is that every once in a while, Spotify gets to release upcoming albums a week or two in advance of retail.

    Their execution up to this point has been more or less brilliant, and I, for one, am gladly paying them 10 EUR/month.

  12. Re:First post! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    minor correction, triple j is an australian national non-commercial radio station, with most of the shows broadcasting from melbourne and sydney, but in no way restricted to just those cities

  13. Re:ip law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Because everyone else is paid for their work ONCE?

  14. Re:What's left for users outside the U.S.? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    So why don't you quote the whole line?

    On what platforms can I use Spotify?
            Mac OS X 10.4 or later and Windows XP or later. You can also run Spotify in Wine on Linux.

  15. How to use Pandora full speed outside the US by TheSpoom · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
    1. Re:How to use Pandora full speed outside the US by TheSpoom · · Score: 2, Informative

      FYI, this doesn't put audio data through Tor, just the website, so we're not slamming you. For whatever reason, Pandora doesn't check the GeoIP on the audio servers, just the interface.

      --
      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
  16. Re:What's left for users outside the U.S.? by Sylos · · Score: 2, Informative

    Grandfather post. The post that starts this specific thread of conversation

    --
    'Number-memorizing Chinese people.'-Anon
  17. Re:Doesn't make sense by Vancorps · · Score: 2, Informative

    That is not true, the copyright owner can license as many people as he or she wants to distribute their work. It's just in most situations a recording artist will grant exclusive rights to a record label hopefully to get a better deal since exclusive licensing is worth more.

    Think of it this way, if I write software using a closed license like Microsoft does I may wish to license the code to both IBM and Novell so that they can use it too. A lot of this muddied the waters for the SCO debacle.