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Old 08-03-2010, 05:51 PM   #96
DMcCunney
New York Editor
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sabredog View Post
Forget DRM, geographic restrictions is the worst. It is simply not necessary.
I wish it were that simple. Unfortunately, at present, it is necessary.

"International rights" tend not to exist for books. An author writes a book, gets lucky, and gets published. When the rights are sold to a publisher, they don't normally buy all rights, everywhere. (Among other things, authors and agents don't like to sell all rights, everywhere, to a single buyer.) So a US publisher may have the rights to sell a title in the US. If the book gets foreign interest, it may have a different publisher in Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Russia, etc. Those publishers bought the rights to offer the book in their respective territories. The US publisher may issue an ebook, but may not have the right to sell it abroad, so a purchaser outside the US may discover the website won't accept their order, because the site knows where they are based on their IP address and the publisher doesn't have the rights to sell the book there.

The customer must then play games to get around the restriction, like using a proxy server that makes their location appear to be different that it actually is, or work through an agent where the book can be sold, or resort to the darknet.

It's a very real problem, but it isn't going away any time soon, and it can't. There are too many people with a legitimate monetary interest, and any proposed solution will gore someone's ox.
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Dennis
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