Quote:
Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
If you have deliberately bypassed measures the publisher has taken to ensure that only authorised customers can get the book, what you are getting is an unauthorised copy.
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Geo-restrictions aren't founded in copyright law; they're founded in sales contracts. They're contracted because of copyright law, but there are no "unauthorized customers," only distributors who aren't authorized to sell in some regions.
If an UK citizen walks into a US bookstore, he can buy a copy of Peter Pan published by an indie publisher because it's in the public domain here. The fact that the publisher can't distribute to the UK doesn't make him an unauthorized customer. He could also order it online, and have them ship it to him. If the store has a policy of not shipping overseas, he can have a friend buy it for him & ship it to the UK, he still hasn't broken any copyright laws by evading the stores "no overseas sales" policies. He bought a book from a US store under US laws.
If an ebook store is authorized to sell copies, the customers aren't breaking laws if they manage to buy a copy the store wasn't supposed to sell to them. (If a store sells 200 copies of the new Harry Potter book before the release date, the customers haven't broken copyright law.) It's the store's responsibility to make sure its customers fit within the criteria their contractual agreement with the publisher allows, not the customer's responsibility to know the details of those contracts and the laws that govern them.
If I can get to a certain site using Firefox but not Internet Explorer, because the store is required not to sell to "Microsoft customers," am I breaking the law if I still use Windows?
Stores that have contracted to only sell to a limited range of customers are responsible for figuring out who those are. And if their contracts say they won't sell to "Customers in the UK, as defined by IP address ranges [X] through [Y]," then customers using a different IP range are obviously not part of that group.