Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
My view on this whole matter is that dividing the world into segments and selling the rights individually was something that was possible and logical before ebooks and the internet. It is no longer either logical or even technologically feasible, though we are left with the legacy of the times when it was. That it works at all at the moment is due only to the technologically unsophisticated or apathetic. Like it or not, the reality is that for electronic goods and/or services we now have one world market, though it may take some time for the law and the industries concerned to recognise this.
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The problem is, darryl, that buying world-wide rights is often enormously expensive, and would make services prohibitively expensive for everyone. Consider a service like Amazon's "Prime Video" service (or whatever it's called) that provides video streaming for people in the US and UK (and perhaps some other places, too - I don't know). Amazon have bought the rights to stream specific TV programmes and films to people in the UK. If they had to buy the rights to stream world-wide it might cost - I don't know - 50x as much? Not only would this be enormously expensive for Amazon, but it would also almost certainly make the service prohibitively expensive for customers, too, because they'd be the ones who'd end up paying for it.
I completely agree with your sentiments in principle, but the practice is something else entirely.