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Comment by ac29 | Hacker News Reader

Its not a free trade issue, its a matter of contractual distribution agreements with geographical limitations. That's pretty common in many industries, not just those dealing in digital goods.

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The consumer never agreed to those contracts. He bought the goods in the US, and imported them into Canada, via a VPN. He could just as well have driven across the border, bought a DVD, and carried it back.

DVDs have region locking. The United States and Canada happen to be in the same region, and there are bypasses, but technical controls against importing digital goods are already normalized, and I doubt this analogy will convince policymakers.

This is irrelevant. Replace DVD with an apple. The point is that free trade between countries means you should be able to buy in one country and use in the other country.

The policymakers can be safely assumed to be hostile on this anyway (usually because they're bought by the lobbyists). The goal, therefore, is to throw them out and replace them with ones that are not, not to convince them. Convincing is for the voters to do that.

DVD region locking isn't much of a "technical control". There are 8 regions, because that's the number of bits in a byte. The region lock is a single byte that specifies which regions are intended to read the disc. On the honor system, a DVD player is supposed to read this byte, check the bit for its region, and refuse to play the disc if the bit is unset.

The only "control" here is that it's assumed you don't have a copy of the DVD spec and don't realize what the lock consists of. Ignoring it suffices to bypass it.

>technical controls against importing digital goods are already normalized

then why is bell canada whining about VPNs, if they're normal and accepted?

Sounds like Bell doesn't really want to offer IP services. They should just pivot their business to work on a proprietary system they have 100% control over. Maybe resurrect OSI and convince Canadians it's better.

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