By now, you all know the 'ol Make a Japanese Xbox Live Silver Account to Download the Foreign Goodies trick, right? For the past two years, you've been downloading Japanese demos (Eternal Sonata anyone?) and nobody's said a thing about your reckless blurring of international copyright boundaries. ... until now. Microsoft has seemingly disabled this clever workaround in their new Xbox Originals program. Siliconera tried using a Japanese Live account to download either Puyo Pop Fever or Magatama – two original Xbox titles available on Japanese Xbox 360s – and were greeted with an error "explaining the download was not available in [their] region." So, your money's no good anymore, is that it? The free stuff, they'll turn a blind eye, but as soon as you're waving around those Billy Bucks, everything's different, eh?
Well, not really. This is similar to Microsoft's existing policy on other Xbox Live Marketplace content (think movies or TV shows), where they've enabled region locking by considering the user's IP, not simply the nationality associated with a Gamertag. Are we shocked? No ... but that doesn't make the pain go away.
