Not-so-World-Wide Web

I wanted to write about Napster's new free music service. Not the old free music service that got them in a lot of trouble, since they were helping folks, you know, steal the music (by sharing it -- sharing = theft. HUH?). This is a new service that lets you listen to as many songs as you want, all for free. As you might suspect, they're only available as a web-stream, so you can't save them to your hard drive or put them on your MP3 player, and apparently you can't listen to any single song more than 5 times.

Of course I wanted to try out the new serive before I wrote about it, but it turns out that I can't. Because it's only available to people in the US. The same thing happened when I heard that several US television networks (ABC Full Episode Streaming, CBS Ondemand) were offering free episodes you could watch online. USA-only. And the same with some of the stuff for sale at Google Video. USA-only. Hey, I thought this was the WORLD WIDE web? So what's the deal???

Yeah, I'm pretty sure there are some reasonably logical reasons for it that the lawyers and the beancounters understand. International publishing and licensing deals and all that. But as a web-user, I just don't give a damn. If they're going to offer these services and put all this stuff on the web, then it ought to be there for everybody.