Pandora is closed off – USA is destroying music, freedom and the internet.

For those of you that don’t know, Pandora is a free, legal service that allows you to stream full length music tracks over the internet. You then input your favourite bands, groups or singers into Pandora. A complex algorithm will then return to you a list of bands that you might never have heard of, because they’re too obscure or that you’ve never heard of them.

It has allowed me to double my legal music catalogue, buying albums from artists that I would never have even considered.

So it greatly annoys me when Pandora announced this week that they are stopping they’re service of streaming music to users outside of the USA. They said in a statement,

    “Delivery of Pandora is based on proper licensing from the content rights holders – we have always believed strongly in honoring the guidelines as determined by the artists, labels and publishers. In the U.S. there is a federal statute called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that provides this license for all the music you hear on Pandora. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent license outside the U.S.”

So from that statement we can clearly see that the only reason why Pandora can’t broadcast to outside of the USA is because of the DMCA. The DMCA is a US law signed by President Clinton in 2000, and it will be the cause of Digg probably being taken off-line soon. 

It is all supposed to protect the good of the country (the World according to the USA that is).

Restrictions to import and export of games, videos and digital content has long been controlled and has long been circumvented by techies. Region codes on DVDs and DRM infections in all downloadable media content simply have no place in the modern global economy.

America, it’s laws and it’s ’special interest committees’ such as the RIAA are beginning to police the World, and dictate what we in other countries are allowed to watch or listen to. 

How can we stop them?