Last.fm today announced that they will be charging users from outside the US, UK and Germany 3 € per month if they want to keep using the last.fm radio. From their blog:

There will be a 30 track free trial, and we hope this will convince people to subscribe and keep listening to the radio. Everything else on Last.fm (scrobbling, recommendations, charts, biographies, events, videos etc.) will remain free in all countries, like it is now.

Now, I don’t believe that everything on the Interwebs should be for free. I’ve actually been a last.fm subscriber for quite a while, and I didn’t mind then that the service they provided for me was in fact inferior to what they provided in the above mentioned three countries.

But now, I feel a bit screwed over. I’m angry, but not at last.fm (well, there is a bit of rage there, but that’s purely emotional, not rational). I’m sure that the people who are put on the frontline, the ones that have to put up with the anger now unloading on them via their blog’s comments, are not the ones making decisions like these. They just want a great product and they want everyone to enjoy what they built.

Which used to be a viable idea on the Internet. You know, when it was still possible for everyone all over the world to enjoy what someone from a totally different place had decided to put online. Nowadays? Not so much. With all that bullshit about licensing deals, great services like last.fm, Pandora or even Youtube are going down the fucking drain because some suits think they need to squeeze every possible penny out of the rights they acquired in a world long gone and unfit for today’s technical advances.

It’s a shit world.

Hulu, the much hated then much hyped, now much, well, online, video website has officially launched.

But, and this holds true for everyone residing outside the US, they won’t actually show me any clips. Which renders it totally useless and an utter failure in my book. Over at Mashable, Stan Schroeder comes to the same conclusion, writing:

And you know what? As a user, I don’t care what the reasons for this are. I don’t care about copyright. For me, the site doesn’t work, and that means it has absolutely zero value. The Internet knows no boundaries; if you try to set up artificial ones you’re going to fail, period.

I totally agree. Even though the website explicitly states that they only cater to US-residents, there’s still no need to laud that. It’s an infliction brought to us by the abomination that’s international copyright law that websites that actually offer content suitable for international audiences, like video, can’t do so.

Hulu’s main goal was to counter the unauthorized use of copyrighted content on sites like YouTube or DailyMotion. Well, they won’t have much luck in that regard, the way they are doing business now.