Actually, this is getting increasingly interesting...
This quote
Quote:
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"Federal laws prohibit discrimination based on a person's national origin, race, color, religion, disability, sex, and familial status. Laws prohibiting national origin discrimination make it illegal to discriminate because of a person's birthplace, ancestry, culture or language. This means people cannot be denied equal opportunity because they or their family are from another country..."
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That meraxes posted seems pretty clear to me. So, if somebody decides to sue, they should just be able to quote the above and would win. Of course, in reality it would not be so easy, but it's a good starting point. It might also be a good starting point to attack the silly import VAT stuff they give us on physical goods here in Germany.
As much as I respect companies trying to protect themselves from imports ruining prices I believe the system is not really valid anymore if said companies produce their mercahndise in "cheap-labour" countries and then sell them here for a premium price as "Made in Germany"...
But that is an entirely different topic of course.
The thing that really bugs me is, why anybody would be interested in the geo-restrictions stuff. Sony did it, Amazon is doing it and several others are also doing it. The problem is pretty new, so it can't be "relics" from old contracts, and I don't think the authors are behind this, because I honestly can't see them begging their publishers to restrict sales to certain areas. Maybe it really has something to do with taxes, because import-VAT would not be applied on ebooks at the moment (if I buy from booksonbaord I get excellent prices because I pay in Dollars and the Dollar is currently rather weak compared to the Euro). Maybe that is the issue and we are ranting about Copyright, Authros and Publishers in vain? But who is going to give us a straight answer? Amazon.com never answered my questions about the geo-restrictions...
