Today a big deal is being made of the fact that apple is finally going live with itunes in the land down under. Me ? I point to this as a prime case in point of how idiotic most of the uses of the internet are at this point in time. The idea that itunes should be limited geographicly is absurd. The power of the internet is that it works essentially at the speed of light and anyone connected can access any part of it from any place. Thus there should have been no question of who could use itunes before... they just needed a computer and a sufficient connection to download the content.
For physical items I can somewhat understand not having international shipping support; However, in this case the shipping system is the internet. So what gives? The old way of thinking about distribution of physical content simply does not pertain to the internet. It does not and cannot adhere to geographical boundaries and trying to do so is the moral equivalent of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
This is the same issue as is facing Google in its attempt to digitise books. That process is LONG overdue. We have had the capacity to place every book published in acessible digital text for about a decade now.. and we have had the ability to capture older titles via OCR for almost as long. The only reason it hasn't been done is this mode of thinking that the net has to function by the same rules as physical media. Trying to enforce copyright in the digital domain in the same way as it is treated for physical media is like herding cats or catching lighting in a bottle. It AINT GOING TO HAPPEN. Trying to do so is like a 300 pound woman trying on a spandex dress... some things just don't go together.
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