Quote:
Originally Posted by AnotherCat
I think what many people forget or do not understand is that copyright protection is a right given by legislation. That means that it is a right gifted to the rights holder by the public of the country the legislation is in.
As I see it, when a right is gifted by one party to another there should be respect of that gifting by the party the right is gifted to by them treating it as being a two way street; one does not set out to screw those gifting. In the case of books and video (and to a lesser extent music) rights holders, in general but not all, treat the public with complete disdain. They have bamboozled much of the public and themselves into believing that the public have no rights at all in the matter; that to the extent of the exaggerated abuse that one sees even in these forums, such as calling any public who intentionally (or in some cases even unintentionally) circumvents rights, as being thieves, etc.
I believe that there is much that could be done, but recognize the difficulties enacting changes by any country who remains tied to Convention. I am not going to get into what could be done except for giving one example.
Geo restrictions on the distribution of content by rights holders is in my mind one of the abuses against those who gifted those rights to them. To me it is an abuse to decide who gets ones content if that decision is made on the basis of religion, ethnicity, race, country of residence or wealth. In the case of most content the decision as to who gets that content is likely most often based on wealth and country of residence. That is countries who have large and wealthy populations will generate the most revenue and that is at cross purposes with the intent of copyright; although many have been bamboozled into not realizing that.
So, for that example, my view is that geo restrictions on content, including streamed content, should not be allowed. There are those who claim that content is the rights holders and they can impose any restriction they care to and it is not the business of anyone else, but that is being blind to the fact that the rights were actually gifted to the rights holder by those being denied access.
That all said, I respect those rights holders that do see the gifting of rights to them by legislation as being a two way street (for example authors of important books who have made their work electronically available for personal use within the normal copyright term).
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Geo-restrictions is largely an artifact of two things. First, the old business model from when publishing was not world wide, but local. Second, the issue of individual laws. Many online stores are US only because they simply don't want to deal with all the various laws and such in the various countries.