¿Free downloads only for USA?

Question

I have a Mac since two months, bying music sometimes from iTunes etc., all great. Every now and then I see interesting FREE downloads on the USA site of Apple. But sine I live in Spain I can not get these downloads, and on the Spanish iTunes store these downloads are not available. I don´t understand this? Why is this?
Ed H.

Answer 1

The issue is not restricted to US content providers by any means; most of the record companies have parent companies elsewhere that the US, and they are just as restrictive, if not more so, than US businesses (the big push for copy protection on CDs has come from Europe, not the US).
You might find this interesting, from This Business of Music (10th Edition) (by M. William Krasilovsky and Sydney Shemel) (and thanks to the Mimico Kid for the reference) :
The difficulty of establishing workable business models for digital files (...) extends to where they are sold and where they are played. This is the issue of territoriality, and it is an illustration of how the Internet makes it necessary to reexamine basic assumptions that have been taken for granted (...).
(....) In the music business the primary problem is that copyrights are national and therefore specific rights are tied to national laws and the interpretations of national courts.
(.... T)hough we can one day hope to see the development of common standards with respect to copyright, the fact that the music business is building upon a history of nation-specific contractual relationships means that the goal of universal international standards is not, for the forseeable future, a practical one.
(...) Adding to the difficulty (...) the copyrights themselves may have been assigned to different companies in different territories. The best hope for a cleaner start and a simpler future is worldwide recognition that digital uses are in fact - and should be in law - totally new.