21–30 of 65 posts
Make a pile of old tablets in your life that you cannot legally do anything with.
When are we going to revolt and insist we own what we buy without being criminals?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US government doesn't want textbooks to be more expensive in the US so a tariff makes no sense. This is corporations wanting their goods to be more expensive where people have more money, which they can legally do. Tariffs are unrelated.
Tariffs purpose is to allow corporations to have higher prices locally. Both tariffs and copyright regulations are laws created by the government, and both increase how expensive a item is in the country. How are they unrelated?
Globalisation has meant that some companies can shop around the entire globe for raw materials and manpower, looking for the best price for both. They then throw up every barrier they can to stop individuals doing the same, region locking and other DRM, bought laws to prevent workarounds etc.
They also try to prevent other businesses taking advantage of market disparities to undercut 'official' prices. The same market disparities that allow them to get their labour and materials for next to nothing. The whole thing stinks.
Good discussion of the same case here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4706572 There's a lot of FUD ("they might" "a ruling could") in this article. The short version is that this case deals with the fact that the Copyright Act prohibits unlicensed copying _and_ importing of copyrighted goods.[1] It comes up because (just like in the textbook case), it behooves a lot of manufacturers to charge a high price in the…
The only question raised by this case is if you wanted to fly to Manila, buy 1,000 textbooks at the Philippines price and then sell them in the US at the US price, could the textbook manufacturer claim that you imported unlicensed goods into the US? Regardless of the consequences, it's surprising to me that anybody who doesn't earn money through regional copyright-based price discrimination thinks that it's proper fo…
However, it's quite reasonable to prevent business import of goods from abroad. Then, you're basically preventing the producer from assigning different $-value in different regions. Sometimes, that is desirable (market arbitrage), but sometimes, it's not (phisical goods should more closely follow PPP (purchasing power parity), especially if their marginal costs are low).
This whole area of law annoys me. Globalisation has meant that some companies can shop around the entire globe for raw materials and manpower, looking for the best price for both. They then throw up every barrier they can to stop individuals doing the same, region locking and other DRM, bought laws to prevent workarounds etc. They also try to prevent other businesses taking advantage of market disparities to undercut…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tariffs purpose is to allow corporations to have higher prices locally. Both tariffs and copyright regulations are laws created by the government, and both increase how expensive a item is in the country. How are they unrelated?
No, the purpose of tariffs is to make domestically-produced goods cheaper than imported goods, not to raise the price for the consumer.
Of course. The purpose of tariffs is neither to increase nor lower the prices of goods. The purpose of tariffs from the government point of view is to increase self-production, value generating, and self-sustainability. But the practical effect of an tariff is a higher priced product for the consumer. In the word of wikipedia: Typical analyses find that tariffs tend to benefit domestic producers and government at the expense of consumers.
This whole area of law annoys me. Globalisation has meant that some companies can shop around the entire globe for raw materials and manpower, looking for the best price for both. They then throw up every barrier they can to stop individuals doing the same, region locking and other DRM, bought laws to prevent workarounds etc. They also try to prevent other businesses taking advantage of market disparities to undercut…
What kind of solution do you propose?
This whole area of law annoys me. Globalisation has meant that some companies can shop around the entire globe for raw materials and manpower, looking for the best price for both. They then throw up every barrier they can to stop individuals doing the same, region locking and other DRM, bought laws to prevent workarounds etc. They also try to prevent other businesses taking advantage of market disparities to undercut…
What kind of solution do you propose?
1. Remove the barriers. Drop import and export restrictions, drop punitive tariffs, reduce taxes; at the same time, make restrictive DRM and equivalents (copyright controlling imports, in the instant case) illegal. This will reduce production costs and reduce selling prices. Overall, standard of living will rise slightly where production costs are low and sink more dramatically where production was formerly located. Eventually, the markets should reallocate themselves efficiently, but it can be a long and painful process and lots of people will get hurt.
2. Enforce all the barriers more rigorously. Apply import tariffs on everything, support local producers by mandating price floors, don't allow reimportation at all. Smuggling becomes much more lucrative, as does the black market. Advances in miniaturization mean that we can track fractional ownership of everything; instead of buying a coffee machine, you rent one, along with the mugs and spoons. (Clearly we need to reduce frictional costs immensely, or else the inertia drags us to a halt.)
3. We continue to muddle through, with incremental improvements when we (as a society, not we as hackers) recognize the need. Markets get regulated, but not very well or efficiently. Perhaps biases toward the established parties are corrected, perhaps not. If a sufficiently large proportion of the population is enraged, revolution ensues and all bets are off. Otherwise, business as usual.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a " ... purchased outside the US" missing from the title of the piece? The article says: "... seeking to knock out the "first sale" doctrine on goods made abroad" (emphasis mine) - surely a product made abroad, but sold in the US by an authorized importer/reseller will still be subject to first sale? And it would still be legal for students to buy books for themselves abroad?…
I've been far from happy with the way this case has been covered in the tech press; the sky is not falling, you can still resell your iPod when you're done with it. What you can't do is start a side business where you become a company's competitor by finding another country where prices are low enough that you can buy bulk and import into the US for less than the US price.
Which should surprise practically nobody, so I guess that's why everybody is rushing to sensationalize the hell out of this.
(and the fact that a sensationalized version of this appears and gets highly upvoted on HN about once a week is a depressing indicator of not just the press, but the state of the community they're feeding)
This whole area of law annoys me. Globalisation has meant that some companies can shop around the entire globe for raw materials and manpower, looking for the best price for both. They then throw up every barrier they can to stop individuals doing the same, region locking and other DRM, bought laws to prevent workarounds etc. They also try to prevent other businesses taking advantage of market disparities to undercut…
What kind of solution do you propose?
I don't know, it's a hugely complex area. All I can say is it sticks in my craw when things like the Lik-Sang debacle happen in Europe, but at the same time we see industry disappearing abroad. At the moment the big interests seem to be having their cake and eating it too.