Google's new music search, Discover Music, has launched — but not in Canada. Partnering with imeem, lala, iLike, Pandora and Rhapsody, all music providing sites, Google will now determine whether your search has a musical aspect and, if so, throw up a result box that lets you listen to an excerpt of the music and choose to purchase it, if that is possible. There's a video on the site linked to above that illustrates this.
Because of copyright issues, none of the partner providers is able to supply music online in Canada, and, consequently, Google's Discover Music simply doesn't work here. It would seem that there is no licensing structure available that would let these services pay to provide music in this country.
Further marking Canada as a technological backwater is the news that a new online telephone service, Ribbit mobile, like Google Voice, with which it competes, is also unavailable here. Essentially, these services work to coordinate your various telephone numbers and provide voice mail transcription, along with other features. They provide the benefits, in effect, that local phone companies are unwilling to offer, either because they are inept or, more likely, greedy.
Are these services not available in Canada because our copyright law is too lax, i.e. does not protect the IP involved in creating and running the services, or too tight, i.e. does not give the latitude for creative remixing of content or makes rights management too hard?