Let downloads roam free, says ACCC Australia's consumer regulator, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, is pushing back against calls to ban accessing offshore content with means such as VPNs, in a submission to an inquiry into copyright legislation. The competition regulator reckons parallel importation should be available in every market, …
Based on form, we're going to start hearing the lobby groups throwing around their customary inflated figures about how much tax revenue this practice is depriving the government of - or how many 'Australian jobs' are being lost.
Not that I expect the government to actually ban such access but nor do I expect them to clearly say that they are not only legitimate but are an important tool for consumers to shop around for the best deals in a global market place and legislating against this practice would be fundamentally infringing the rights of the public.
It'd be nice if they did say that, but they won't.
@croc
Or like Microsoft and Adobe and other software giants, who insist on selling identical copies of their products at sometimes massively different prices in different markets and yet go and route their sales and profits round the world and back.
Why do Microsoft think it's fair to try and force me to buy their software from an Australian site at an inflated Australian price but then funnel that money off through Ireland and the Netherlands and the Bahamas?
Short version is that they can and if they can then then they will.
I was doing a Crashplan free trial and would have signed up if not for the fact that they made an AU datacentre, forced people in AU and NZ to use it (without cloning data across, reupload everything pls) and doubled the price. Their explanation: geographical proximity. Ignoring the fact that I'd prefer my data further away actually.
Needless to say, they didn't get my business.
But this geographical fuckery has been happening for years now. Valve seems to think that a 50% AU/NZ surcharge is reasonable on many games. :/
>Why do Microsoft think it's fair to try and force me to buy their software from an Australian site at an inflated Australian price
To be fair, pretty much everything in Australia is sold at over-inflated prices. That's why we have, er, inflation, or at least, that's why the $A has crashed.
Then again, we wouldn't have over-inflated costs if we hadn't be subjected to general protectionist policies which combined with an isolationist mentality to create a pure "market driven" economy; and by "market driven" I mean, "everyone consistently tries to overcharge."
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