Geographical discrimination = Stupid
Posted by Ray @ 11:52 pmThe powers that be recently released John Hodgeman’s The Areas of my Expertise for free on iTunes as an audio book. It’s an abridged version, running at almost 7 hours.
If you know who he is, delight in the geeky deadpan delivery. If you don’t… well, poo to you.
Except even though it is free, iTunes requires me to make an account to download it. And everyone in Singapore cannot do that, because nobody can buy stuff from iTunes in Singapore. Because iTunes hasn’t “come to Singapore” yet.
The whole idea of geographical segmentation for an online business makes complete and utter nonsense. It’s one thing to say you can’t physically ship your product to Singapore. It’s another thing entirely to say you can’t transfer an electronic copy of your product to Singapore.
What the hell? Are record companies scared they won’t get enough “protection”? Come on, our copyright law can kick your civil liberties so hard your loss of habeas corpus looks like a minor inconvenience in comparison. (It’s illegal to make backup copies of CDs you legally own in Singapore. That means the only music you can play on your iPod is music you’ve bought off the ‘net. Up until recently, that meant you had almost zero ways of obtaining legal music. Which means everyone who has an MP3 player is almost certainly a criminal under Singaporean law. Also, we never had the right to habeas corpus =P).
After that initial flash of fury, I just went to my favourite bittorrent site and downloaded it. And I feel fully justified. Pah!
