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.

Comments

Old news ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought they shut down listening to non-USA last year ?

Re:Old news ?

[Dayze!Confused]

Although this is old news it brings to light again the growing trend of limiting content based on location. I am an American living in a foreign country and there are a lot of sites that I cannot go to because content is limited to US IP addresses.

Sites such as cbs.com have content only available in the US. Youtube also has some videos only available in the US. Now, it seems from the discussion, that most music sites have also turned that way. Our globalized world is getting torn apart again by content providers.

Re:What's left for users outside the U.S.?

[Fluffeh]

Can't you get around it by using a proxy?

Re:First post!

[Anonymous Coward]

They've been blocking Germany for years now.

Re:First post!

[BikeHelmet]

They blocked Canada a while back. 6 months? Maybe longer - I can't remember the exact date it first came up.

ip law

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:ip law

[clarkkent09]

Care to elaborate a bit on the world without IP laws? 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?

Re:ip law

[FlyingGuy]

Don't waste your breath on these miscreants. These people create no artistic works, they make nothing of artistic value, they simply believe they can take what they want when they want it. They believe © means they have a right to copy and give away anything they please.

I personally believe IP law needs serious reform, but you have to draw the line someplace.

And least you forget, all record companies are evil ( even though they lay out huge sums of money and make a suckers bet every time they back a new artist ) and deserve absolutely no return on their investment.

Re:ip law

[gringofrijolero]

...but you have to draw the line someplace.

That's right! 18 years..max! Take it or leave it. And record companies can become simple hired press agents without no exclusivity and can get paid a small commission AFTER the creator gets paid. Real competition..the horror! I don't suppose you could ever get used to the idea that recordings are promotional material to entice people to pay for a performance as opposed to the recording actually being the performance. That's like the dummies who pay to receive a phone call, or a text message. Wow! If only my line of work worked like that...

The shills come out at night..

Re:ip law

[clarkkent09]

Entertainment shouldn't be an industry.

Why pick on entertainment? There is nothing wrong with exchanging your work for money, I bet you do it every day. Why do you feel its ok for you to be paid for your work, but its somehow wrong for artists, musicians, writers etc to demand be paid for theirs?

Re:ip law

[clarkkent09]

That's right! 18 years..max!

And what hat did you pull that number out of? I think the copyright term will have to be an arbitrary number but just curious how did you come up with that and not 25 or 50 etc.At least the lifetime of the creator of the work (but not his/her children) would make slightly more sense to me than just picking a number.

And record companies can become simple hired press agents without no exclusivity and can get paid a small commission AFTER the creator gets paid.

They can but that's a matter of contracts between them and the artists which frankly is not any of your business to put arbitrary limitations on. 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.

Re:ip law

[grcumb]

Care to elaborate a bit on the world without IP laws? 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?

Care to speculate on how artists, musicians, writers, etc. managed in a world that not only lacked IP law, but also lacked the ability to reach anything approaching the kind of widespread audience that's available to modern artists?

Creative artists have survived far longer without so-called Intellectual Property protections than they have with them. And they've done so under far, far less salubrious circumstances.

Seriously, think about it: If strong copyright laws had existed in Elizabethan times, we'd probably have a much smaller Shakespearian canon than we do today. The Folios were compiled after his death by a couple of people who just happened to love his work. They collected partial manuscripts, interviewed actors, even worked from memory. And they did so not out of any particular desire for profit, but because they loved the man's work and wanted it to be remembered.

Tragically, we call these people 'fanbois' today and ridicule their efforts - when we're not busy making them outright illegal. Thank the heavens for simpler times....

Re:ip law

[Aceticon]

It should just work just like any other job: artists should get paid for the work they do (like a performance) once and that's it.

If a plumber comes over to install a new toilet at my place, he gets paid once, not every time anybody flushes it.

Why should I pay Paul McCartney when I get a copy of a Beatles track and then again if I give a copy to my mother and then yet again (to his descendants) when in (say) 20 years time I give a copy of a Beatles track to my grandson?

I don't see why the money I pay in taxes should be propping up a system where some people are by law privileged above all others.

Re:ip law

[Anonymous Coward]

Software - Open source, custom software and software as a service are all doing fine.

It works for some, but not for all kinds of software. Games for example do not appear to work as an open source model. Yes, there are a few open source games but they cannot even begin to compare to commercial titles, even those of indie companies.

In my opinion, games get old too fast. Plus you have to coordinate too many disciplines.

Re:ip law

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is that my problem? How does the lack of a natural business plan justify legislating in an artificial one? There are plenty of things I love to do that have a demand, but I haven't figured out a good way to make money at. Lets face it, that's the trick now isn't it?

Re:ip law

[TheSunborn]

But that logic don't work for most jobs. Let's look at cpus.

Most of the cost of a cpu is research and development. Either direct (Someone from Intel/Amd/Freescale/IBM/Whatever had to design the cpu) or indirect (Most of the cost of a cpu factory, is really the cost of development of the equipment in the factory, not the building itself).

So each time you buy a cpu you pay for a little part of the research done on that cpu. If you buy 100 cpus you pay 100 times as much for the research as the guy who only bought a single cpu. You can say that this is unfair(You both use the same research after all, so why should you pay more?) or fair (You pay for the research in proportion for how much you use it, given that with 100 cpus you use it 100 times as much as the guy with a single cpu).

Just look at most art(Music/Movies/Games and so on) as products with very little margin cost, and very high development+research cost, and you can see that art is currently treated as any other goods produced by our civilization.
The fact that the margin cost is so close to 0, that we will call it 0 does not really change anything.

So the real question is: "Should art be treated as any other product"

And the reason you pay your plumber by the hour with no price discrimination for usage is simply that his cost for research and development is 0.

A system with no ip laws would not work in your world. Who would found research+development in for example solar panels, if your competitors could just copy your design when you were done, thus producing cheaper because they did not have as much research+development to pay for as you did.

What would happen in a modern world with no ip protection is that the cost of goods, would be much closer to their Production cost, but that research and development of new goods would be much slower.

Re:Tor

[93 Escort Wagon]

Given how slow Tor is (for me anyway), it's hard to imagine anyone listening to Pandora that way. Heck, I suspect even lynx would be annoyingly slow over Tor!

Re:What's left for users outside the U.S.?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last.fm, I switched for it when they closed Pandora for me.

Restrict and kill.

[Fross]

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)

Bad in any region

[swordgeek]

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.

Re:Tor

[EdIII]

TOR is NOT a proxy. It can be proxy like, but it is most certainly not a proxy.

First and foremost, TOR was designed to create Anonymity through reasonable doubt. That's its primary goal above all else. As a consequence of it's method of achieving Anonymity, it must act as a proxy for other connections.

Why the anal retentive distinction? Too many people are trying to use it in ways it was not designed too. It's ridiculous, but it's still in it's testing phase at the moment. People keep recommending TOR for one purpose or another, and then inevitably someone comes in and bad mouths TOR, which has already happened to your post and many others.

Well of course it's not going to perform up to anybody's expectations at the moment. With the bandwidth that is actually allocated to TOR through it's members (the exit nodes) it can barely keep up. Most people seem to install TOR and never choose to be an exit node for the rest of their peers. It's like have a torrent system in where only 1% (I admit I am pulling that number out of my ass) ever seed a single kilobyte.

If one does not need anonymity specifically, one can just look for regular proxies. There are plenty of free proxies, both anonymous (they don't send your IP through, but probably log) and paid proxies. A VPN to a system in the U.S with a hosting company is another solution too. Something in one of the "clouds". The choices are endless for this specific "problem".

I only recommend TOR when the purpose is to be completely anonymous, or to an extent in which it is extraordinary difficult to identify you even with participation of some of those involved. Most, if not all, of those purposes involve small amounts of data that the TOR network can handle.

It might be a little more work, but your friend could do a lot better than TOR, and it would be a good idea. At that very least he should at least be an exit node. I appreciate people who run exit nodes outside of the U.S.

I may sound a bit touchy on the subject, but I depend on TOR. Anonymity is very important to me and TOR is a fantastic tool to that end. I just wish the network was not slammed so hard with trivial high bandwidth applications and people that have no intention of ever contributing back.

Re:Tor

[Chad Birch]

Conveniently, Pandora does its "where are you from?" check over the www.pandora.com domain, but streams the music over a different subdomain. This means that you can use FoxyProxy to have your connection to the www subdomain go through TOR, but the music still comes directly to your machine over your normal connection.

Weird, yes. But this is how it works. The page is very slow to load through TOR, but the music plays perfectly once it finally does load. I don't know why they did it this way, but it's certainly helpful for all us non-Americans.

P.S. Why is this news now? Canadians have been locked out of Pandora for at least a few years.

Re:How to use Pandora full speed outside the US

[TheSpoom]

Very little bandwidth is being "wasted" here since audio isn't being piped through Tor (note that I specified www.pandora.com as the server to proxy; audio data is piped over subdomains of pandora.com, so they get sent directly and not over Tor).

And frankly, I think this is within the spirit of Tor. I'm using the system to access information that's being denied to me because of my origin. How is this not "anonymization"?