Quote:
Originally Posted by Xenophon
The key issue here is this: Many publishers do not hold world-wide distribution rights to the books they publish -- even for electronic publishing. This is exactly the source of the problem. The publisher can't (legally) sell outside their region. So their lawyers are telling them "Put a stop to out-of-region sales before we get sued for a zillion dollars!"
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I agree, but it is the lawyers (and only the lawyers) definition of "sell" that is the problem. If I live in the US but fly to the UK, walk into a UK bookstore and pay for a book with a US credit card no one tries to stop me. If I live in the UK but logon to a US ebook store and pay for an ebook with a UK credit card alarm bells ring and warning signs flash. If everyone could agree that UK ebookstores can sell UK ebooks to their customers (no matter where the customers live) and US ebookstores can sell US ebooks to their customers (no matter where the customers live) almost everyone would be happy. My impression is that this would be exactly the legal situation if a US ebookstore copied your ebooks onto a USB stick and mailed that to you in the UK, but if you download them somehow it is different. Note that this isn't an issue of 3rd party involvement, lots of times stuff you buy gets shipped from a warehouse owned by some other company in a truck from yet another company and this has no effect of the transaction from the customers point of view.