I don't know about anyone else, but I discovered a cool little sci-fi series a few weeks ago, A Town Called Eureka, running on Sky. Unfortunately I missed the first few episodes and as a result I looked the show up on the Web.

The show was made by the SciFi Channel in the US, where it runs (or ran, as the first season just finished, both in the US and here - unusually just a couple of weeks behind the US) under the simpler (and rather better, in my view) title Eureka. The series tells the story of the people (centering around the sherriff) of a secret small town for über-geniuses, perhaps in Oregon. Overall, it's a nice piece of work with some clever ideas and enjoyable touches of comedy, drama and sci-fi.

As I'd missed some early episodes, I was particularly interested in the web site's video content, which includes the full-length pilot episode. Well, it does if you live in the US. To the rest of us, we get a message saying, "We're sorry, but the clip you selected isn't available from your location. Please select another clip." WTF?

Well, the site evidently has a little piece of code that examines your IP address and looks it up in a database to see where it comes from. In my case it thinks I'm in Rochdale (that's where my ISP is based) and promptly turns down my request.

You would think that as the show is actually airing in the UK, this "regional coding" would include us. The show has been licensed from SciFi by Sky, so why can't we view the material on the web site? It's a copyright licensing issue of some kind that nobody has quite thought about properly, and in today's internationally-networked world makes no sense anyway.

The whole thing is even more silly than that. Just as you can go into any Tesco store and buy a DVD player for twenty quid that happily ignores any regional coding and plays Region 1 (US) discs just as well as local (Region 2) ones - and if it doesn't there's probably an internet-available hack that will make it do so in a few seconds - you can download free or nearly-free software that allows you to pretend your IP address is in virtually any country you like. So I simply turned on a little app called "MaskMyIp", selected a USA IP address and bang, I could watch the show. I could equally have used a little web browser toolbar thingy called "Anonymity" to do the same.

In today's world, the moment you announce something, it's known about around the world. The minute a DVD is released somewhere, someone will let you buy it over the Internet and ship it to you - and what's more, you can play it. The moment a TV show goes on-air, there is somewhere you can watch it, either via a bit-torrent or some other means. And if it's on a regionally-coded web site, you can get around that too.

So why on Earth do the content-providers bother? It only annoys people and hurts the producers' reputations. Nobody in the world would lose any money if SciFi.com allowed UK visitors to view the pilot episode of Eureka. In fact the ability to access background material on the series such as this would probably encourage more people to watch the show, catching re-runs they missed, and meaning that it's more likely that Sky will buy the second series, making SciFi Channel more money. So why bother restricting it? Why cut off your nose to spite your face? You tell me.