Quote:
Originally Posted by dickon25
DMcCunney
.....Let's say I'm a publisher in a European country. I bid for and get the rights to publish an edition in my country of an international best seller written in the US. I damn well do want the exclusive rights to offer the book in my country....
That's a good summary of the current situation but surely it only applies to physical books because the publisher can physically control their availability in any particular country for which they have the rights. As Ralph Sir Edward says, from the consumer of ebooks point of view, it's now no longer appropriate for how we buy and read books (or music). Or should I say 'How we would LIKE to buy' these media. 
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No, it doesn't just apply to physical books.
One of the common problems in internet related stuff these days is restriction based on location. I used to work for a streaming video provider. We had one case where we had to dive into geolocation, and determine where a viewer was based on IP address, because the client did not have the right to display the video we streamed for them in all locations.
You can determine where the customer is based on their IP address, and while you can get around that with proxy servers, that's not foolproof, since the vendor can also keep a table of common proxy server IPs and block access to them, and in any case, most potential customers will lack the knowledge as well as the incentive to use that workaround.
Hachette caused a bit of a fuss a while back by withdrawing titles from one of the eBook vendors, because they felt the vendor did not have the ability to implement geographical restrictions on sales, and was worried about suits from publishers who had exclusive rights to titles in some areas that sales of Hachette electronic editions from an internet vendor would violate.
The problem is real and not going away. The best solution I see is a revenue sharing deal, where publishers with exclusive rights to titles in a particular area get a cut of ebook sales to customers in that area, even if they aren't technically the publisher of the electronic edition. But that will require cross licensing agreements, and some audit mechanism to insure corect payments are being made.
And there are other aspects of the underlying issues that are still in the process of working themselves out. There was a squabble a while back between Rosetta and Random House, because Rosetta wanted to do electronic editions of books Random House claimed exclusive rights to. The issue was not cut and dried because the original contracts Random House had were written in the days before there
were electronic editions, and authors submitted boxed hardcopy manuscripts for editing, copy editing, proofreading, and typesetting, so the question was whether Random House's contracts were applicable.
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Dennis