China Lifts iTunes Block, Except for Tibet Album
by Evan Shamoon, posted Aug 26th 2008 at 3:30PM
Seems that the Chinese government woke up on the bright side of the hard, stone floor this morning! The iTunes music store is apparently back up and running again in the country, after it was blocked last week by local officials.
Not all is ice cream and puppy dogs, however. While 50 Cent and Bon Jovi downloads are back and in full effect, "Songs for Tibet" -- an album released by the Art of Peace Foundation, an organization that supports Tibetan independence, and which features songs by Sting, Dave Matthews and Alanis Morissette, along with a 15-minute speech by the Dalai Lama -- remains blacklisted. It was the pro-Tibet album that was initially suspected of starting the shutdown in the first place.
Michael Wohl, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Art of Peace, said that 40 American Olympic athletes in Beijing had downloaded the album as a symbol of protest against the government; they decided to remain anonymous, however, because of fear of retribution on China's part.
A spokesman at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., was unavailable for comment about the situation. As well as being inaccessible on iTunes, the album cannot be reached from China on either Amazon.com or YouTube, which is, as they like to say in the trade, "no coincidence". [From: SF Gate]
