12
Nov

Howto convince the iStore you’re from the US and circumvent regional copyright restrictions

   Posted by: Swizec   in Uncategorized

Copyrighted
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Yesterday somebody shared a cool podcast with me.

Well I should say they tried to, thing is, I didn’t have an iStore account. But whatever, I’ll just make one right? Well … no. That particular podcast is only available in the US due to copyright restrictions or something, or maybe it’s just that most of the store is US only, but whatever. Thing is, I had to make an account and I had to make an American one. Not a Slovene one.

No biggie right, go to the iStore, make an account.

Well no, you can’t choose where you’re from.

So let’s change the language/locale to US and voila, american store. HEY even paypal is available now (yes we’ve got PayPal in Slovenia but Apple is an idiot and doesn’t aknowledge this fact).

Yay, choose paypal, make account. Nope, says I’m not from the US. Fine, I’ll give you my credit card info … well fuck you mister Swizec, credit card says you’re not american. Fail.

This is the process I had to go through to have a valid US Apple ID and iStore account.

  1. Find a free App.
  2. Download App.
  3. Create account
  4. Choose without CreditCard (they can’t demand payment info for free downloads, some legal stuff afaik)
  5. Enter some US address found on google maps (I used M5 Industries because Mythbusters is made there and I love Mythbusters). Btw this isn’t identity theft because you use your own name.
  6. Rejoice, you have a valid US iStore account

Great! I can now download FREE stuff that is, for some strange and utterly absurd reason, only available in the US. Why have region restricted copyright when the content is bloody free is … can anyone explain this at all?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 15:24 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 comments so far

3pike
 1 

Kick them in the nuts!

If you’re an apple’s user it should be available no matter where you’re from…

November 12th, 2009 at 15:33
Jure
 2 

>>Why have region restricted copyright when the content is bloody free is … can anyone explain this at all?

Does it mater? It’s up to the author to decide, maybe they want to do different deals, A/B test different app on European audience, etc.

November 12th, 2009 at 18:04
Swizec
 3 

It does matter. The whole point of even inventing the internet was to bring humanity closer together, not to impose arbitrary restrictions when they become afraid of it.

I wouldn’t mind if there was a different flavour of the app for Europe and the US, we do have slightly different preferences afterall, but when I simply can’t get the content at all because I’m from the wrong country? Isn’t that racism or at the very least ethnicism? How many international laws do we have against that hmm?

November 12th, 2009 at 22:02
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