Watch The HIMYM LilysInLabor.com Video Geographically Restricted By CBS

As I have written in previous posts I am a fan of the CBS show “How I Met Your Mother” (HIMYM). Last night was a double episode for the Season 7 finale dubbed ‘The Magician’s Code, Part One’ and ‘The Magician’s Code, Part Two.’ As per usual, the HIMYM team ensured that when a website was mentioned in the show – in this case LilysInLabor.com – that the site actually exists in the real world. The site has a short video about how the character Lily is in labor which the main character Ted created to send out in an email so everyone would know about the momentous occasion. As per usual, I visited the site from my phone at the commercial break after it was mentioned and saw that it required Flash to view the video…I thought nothing of it and just planned to check it out later. When I got to my computer a bit later I went to the site and because I am in Canada this is what I saw:

I have already mentioned how silly I think it is for certain things to be restricted based on geography. In this case, however, it wasn’t even an entire episode of the show it was one little digital short that ties in to the plot of the episode. I immediately took to Google and with a bit of searching was able to find someone who had ripped the video off the Official CBS site and uploaded it to YouTube without geographic restrictions (at least without them for Canada, I can’t speak for the rest of the world but let us know in the comments if you’re elsewhere and can/can’t watch the video).

Because I’m me I decided to embed the video here so all y’all can watch it too! Hopefully, CBS doesn’t complain to YouTube about the video and have them take it down because I think we all know it will just be put up again very quickly by a different uploader or on a different site. In fact, I already found two of the same video (the slight choppiness on the first two words on both indicate that they’re the same source) on YouTube so if one gets taken down I am going to embed both.

Without further ado here they are:

And here’s the second one:

Content Producers & Distributors: Stop Encouraging Piracy

Media producers and distributors don’t you think it is time you guys joined the rest of the world in the 21st Century and stopped with these silly rules based on geolocation? Honestly, you are just encouraging the very piracy you sit around complaining about. Case in point the image above. My friends and I were talking about re-watching this series from 2004-05 which unfortunately got cancelled after one season. My friend looked for the DVDs and they don’t exist. He looked for it on iTunes, and it is not available to be sold in Canada. What do you think people’s next step is going to be? We look online and see if we can find it pirated. Lo and behold it is readily available online!

Another case in point my friend asked me to recommend some new music. I told him about this awesome new artist I had heard about out of the UK. My friend went to iTunes to look for the artist’s music and download it only to find they only had one or two songs available for download in Canada. Can you guess what the next steps were? (Hint: Exactly the same as above.)

Both of the cases above were people willing and ready to pay for the content but they weren’t allowed to because of a boundary drawn on a map. The first example specifically that content is available FOR FREE on one side of a line and utterly unavailable for any price on the other side of it. Calling it ridiculous doesn’t begin to do this justice.

If content distributors aren’t distributing the content where they have the license to do so then their licenses should be revoked and be given to someone who will or just be distributed by the creators themselves. It is that simple. This is the second decade of the 21st Century and it is time the people who are in charge of getting content out there realized what this means. If you don’t, then I don’t see how you can then turn around and complain that people are pirating your content when you seem to be doing everything you can to encourage them to do so.