NEWS - Friday, May 4, 2007
Xbox Marketplace Territory Controls Strengthened
As you may have noticed over the past few months, Xbox LIVE Marketplace has seen tremendous growth with tons of additional gaming and entertainment content, as well as a number of new partners. We are committed to providing great content to all of our users, however not all content is available for use in all countries. For example, as indicated in our Terms of Use, the movies and TV shows available on Xbox LIVE Marketplace are currently available only for use in the United States. Some of our contracts and agreements with content partners, particularly in the area of entertainment, restrict in which countries we may make certain content available. There are a number of reasons for these restrictions, including legal rights and regulations. In addition, various countries such as Germany have regulations when it comes to what content is acceptable for distribution to their residents. As a digital distributor of content, we are responsible and accountable to comply with those government regulations and the licensing agreements we have with our partners. As a general policy we try to get global rights to content, but in some cases, it's not possible because of legal restrictions. In other instances, we have to get legal rights on a country-by-country basis, which unfortunately results with us having content on the service that has to be filtered based on geographical location. So what does this mean to you? Well, if you have an account that matches the country where you are located, then you will probably notice little to no difference. However, if you have set up an account that does not match the country where you are located, you will find that these new security measures will only allow you to purchase and download content that is licensed in the country where you are located. For example, if you are not located in the US, but have created a US Xbox LIVE account, you will not be able to download TV shows and movies that are currently available for use only in the US. Again, for most people this will not be an issue, but we have heard that there are a few folks out there who have tried to access restricted content this way. We understand that this may be frustrating for some users, and hope they understand our responsibility, and the necessary security requirements that need to be in place in order to comply with applicable laws and honor our agreements with content providers. If you're located in the US, and you're having any issue downloading content after applying the Spring Update, call 1-800-4MY-XBOX.Source: http://gamerscoreblog.com/
