Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Are you suggesting that rights holders should not have the right to sell their content to different buyers in different parts of the world? That all sales should be world-wide? The net result of that would almost certainly be an even greater stranglehold on content by a small number of large corporations than we have at present.
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The rights holders should have the right to sell the content to different buyers in different parts of the world but that doesn't mean it has to be exclusive rights and it doesn't mean that the control has to (or should extend) beyond the point of sale to the consumer.
The technology needs to be considered. The world wide web was never designed to have geographical or state boundaries. On the contrary is was designed to intentionally ignore those boundaries. If you want to distribute digital files across that technology you have to recognize that you can't enforce geographical restrictions. If you were selling analog broadcasts it's recognized that you can't stop the analog signals at a countries borders and there are going to be signal overlap, you recognize that limitation and don't try to enforce exclusive delivery. You enforce at the point of origin.
It's fine to define geographic restrictions on fixed/known parameters such as the consumers billing address or the companies head office location. The problem is that the rights holders have ignored the experts that told them they can't effectively control geographical restrictions on the world wide web and listened to the sales people (that were trying to sell them technology) that claimed they could control it. The technology is imperfect and doesn't handle all the use cases. The decisions were based on what they wanted to have and not what the technology can deliver. Instead of recognizing the failure they've tried to fix the problem in the terms and conditions of the contracts and let the consumer feel the pain. Now they've build a rats nest and even some people that make their living producing content (like the original blogger) can't defend it.
If they maintain control on the point of sale and ignored trying to enforce it afterwards then everything would be fine. It's not simple to reverse bad decisions though.