Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
It's a legal thing. If you buy a paper book, the "point of sale" is deemed to be the bookstore; if you buy an eBook, the point of sale is the customer's computer.
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Which only demonstrates how surreal "legal things" are, especially when some kind of outdated legal thinking is applied to a realm where it doesn't belong.
Imagine I send the seller, located outside my country, a message with an order for an ebook. And he sends me the ebook back by email. Where is the "point of sale"? Is it my email account or theirs? What if I used my business email account, which is located on a German soil, with .de domain, while travelling through Switzerland, the seller is from the USA and, incidentally, I am a Portuguese with double citizenship?
Or, let's try another model: I phone the seller, he takes down my CC number and gives me a unique code to enter on a web page and download my book. The web page, for the sake of the argument, might be located still elsewhere, in a third country. Or, better still, I the purchaser, am located in Poland, the seller company in the USA, their customer phone support was moved to India and the web server is in the Netherlands. What real sense does the "point of sale" have? It is only a legalistic concept to make things difficult. Why won't it be enough if both sides simply agree that the transaction is governed by "the laws of the vendor country" and that's it...
BTW, I am not arguing that from the legalistic point of view the "point of sale" concept isn't valid when applied to over the air transactions, but that it doesn't make much sense from the pragmatic point of view and it actualy impedes such transactions .