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This may be slightly off-topic, so the moderator should feel free to move it to another forum, but thinking in terms of physical books, it has always been possible to buy books published in the US (for example) in the UK. I'm thinking in terms of SF now. There was for many years, and still is for all I know, a shop in London called 'Forbidden Planet' which sold imported US-published SF books that weren't otherwise available in the UK. I assume this was perfectly legal. The shop was open for at least twenty years, with no attempt to conceal its existence.
Somehow what the e-publishing industry needs is a way to do 'personal' imports, or limited imports from other jurisdictions. I'm not advocating breaking the law, quite the contrary. But if it's legal for physical books in small quantities, why cannot some mechanism be found to make it legal for e-books too?
For physical books one typically paid more - after all the books had to be freighted across the Atlantic. Personally I wouldn't object to, say, paying a fee to some notional copyright fund when importing from another jurisdiction, so that whoever turns out to own the rights gets their cut eventually. What seems ridiculous is the current system of blanket non-availability, presumably for basically financial reasons, when people like me are only too willing to pay a bit extra for the privilege. I think a little technical/legal creativity is required. Current DRM/licensing/distribution technology doesn't reflect the complexity of the real world.
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