Getting around Geograhpical Contraints on Media

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Getting around Geograhpical Contraints on Media

By Martin English | July 10, 2009

Chris Andersen of Long Tail fame has published a book about the economics of “Free” that is making a bit of news on the ‘net.

However, in theory, the various free versions of “Free” have been restricted to certain geographic regions. For example, I’m in Australia, and I can’t access it directly via the scribd website (I get the geographically limited message).

However, I can read the scribd version when I access it via the embedded scribd widget on the page announcing the free versions.

This is a pretty common issue – I occasionally get this problem with music downloads (eMusic does it as well) and other books. A typical example is the Amazon MP3 download site. It’s unfortunate, because I WANT to pay for the music, I reckon my favorite artists should be paid, so once I’ve heard a free track or two, I want to go to a reputable site and download the music; somewhere that will make sure the artists get something.

I’ve got round it in the past with things like Tor and so on, but my latest trick is an Amazon AMI instance – the smallest windows one possible because I’ve installed the Amazon downloader. I have a separate account on Amazon (I registered using a myemail+tag@gmail.com address and put in a fake US address – postcode 90210 because thats one I know).

I save the music to an Amazon S3 site, and download to my devices from there, so the workflow even allows for backups of my purchases.

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