Recording Industry Again Upset At UK Retailer For Selling Foreign CDs Cheaply
from the how-dare-they! dept
Apparently, in the UK, the recording industry just can't allow perfectly legal CDs from other markets to be sold. It would upset their ability to price discriminate against UK buyers. Three years ago, we covered the situation involving UK-based CD retailer CD Wow, who got in trouble for importing CDs from overseas and selling them in the UK at cheaper prices. The CDs themselves were legal -- but just not intended for the UK market. The record labels, of course, had been using price discrimination, making CDs in the UK more expensive than identical CDs elsewhere. It seems ridiculous then to stop someone from committing a little arbitrage and importing the cheaper overseas CDs, but apparently the industry took the situation quite seriously. They're back at it, though, with the British Phonographic Industry (the UK equivalent to the RIAA) now seeking contempt of court charges against CD Wow for apparently selling a few more of these overseas CDs. For its own part, CD Wow denies any wrongdoing, while also pointing out how ridiculous the law is in the first place.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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whatever
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Just more reasons to not buy CD's - they even ADMIT they are needlessly gouging people.
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Why only record industry?
The cost (marketing/distribution/tax/business risk premium/all) differ from country to country.
I do not know the details of price difference/reasons here, but look at the book publishing industry. You can get most of the books originally published in developed worlds for 1/5th price in developing countries. The paper quality is different, but the content is usually same. These books carry a warning label that you can sell those only in those specific countries.
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Re: Why only record industry?
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Dumping
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Typical
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Sounds Fair
Thats why here most dvd players don't have region coding, and those that do you can get an unlocking code from the manufacturer (in most cases anyway) to let it play all regions.
At the end of the day it helps to keep the price of the normal goods (things produced "for" Australia) down to a reasonable level, so the cheaper parallel imports are usually only a little bit less expensive than the normal goods.
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Laws
So, the UK may have some similar law or view. I could see this being a problem as with closer borders the import prices can be potentially lower; creating more of competitive dymnamic.
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Parallel Importing
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This will only hurt poor countries
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The American public would not put up with such extortionate prices for one minute and would just boycot any overpriced goods, unfortunately for the greedy bosses who own and run the music and film industry in the UK we now have universal access to the Internet and are able to research International prices and download music and films from anywhere.
The simple fact of the matter is that 99.9 % of the music industry bosses are well beyond middle age and are only just waking up to the fact that something like the Internet exists, they are 10 to 15 years behind everyone else and will use any tactics they can to try to catch up and restore their profits.
Why else would they hve price descrimination and take companies to court for importing perfectly legal CDs and DVDs from other countries?
Think about this for one moment the biggest four music companies are now playing catch up on the Internet so they have set up huge servers in the United States to store and sell their music products On Line, it all comes from exactly the same servers in the same place in the United States OK.
So why on Earth does it cost consumers in the UK nearly 3 times as much to download that music as it does for someone in the US?
That's called greed and basically is extortion, the companies involved are telling you to pay 2 or 3 times more for the same product or be taken to court for trying to purchase it legally in another country.
Unfortunately for them the Gennie is out of the bottle in the form of Internet access and unless they are willing to level their prices Worldwide they will never stop illegal downloads.
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What can you do?
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