If the big media companies actually cared about piracy they would abandon this system and see piracy drop significantly overnight. Then again I think we all know that's just an excuse to try and hang on to the overinflated profits they're accustomed to for just a little bit longer.
Different countries have different laws, different taxes, and your home country has different treaties and export control regulations that all need to be accounted for when selling to other countries. In some cases there could be markets/services that abstract some of this away, but it is not a trivial problem.
If it was trivial to do, then the only segmentation you would see would only be differentiating on price (getting the most that someone in that region would pay for it), instead of not selling it in those countries at all.
Now, the RIAA/MPAA has deep enough pockets and plenty of lawyers that they could have figured all this out for themselves already, and could have built a great online distribution system for themselves. So for them, segmentation is purely a play for money, though (hopefully) it will hurt their profits in the long run.
Apple has very, very deep pockets and a track record of making money hand over fist, and they've got quite far with music, but movies and TV series are only available in a few countries near the top of the list in terms of GDP. You can infer from that how hard it must be for anyone else.
I assume they make it so difficult because they're terrified of upsetting their existing distribution channels. There's no other way I can explain why a DVD is cheaper than the same movie on iTunes, and why CDs on Amazon are still often cheaper than their MP3 counterparts on the same site.
If so, why? And what possible sanctions do they have against me? Logic would dictate that the country would be responsible for barring access to such resources from within its borders - not individual foreign bussinesses.
[1] see top item on (Sr. Software Engineer...): http://www.payscale.com/research/IN/Country=India/Salary and http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Country=United_States/Sa...
2) You can still make promo prices for different regions, but the service should be available everywhere.
You can still set the price to $30 but you have to actually sell worldwide to have any moral grounds against worldwide piracy.
India estimated total of University students (or at least places): just over 12 million, government policy to increase by factor 2 over by 2025 (BBC 2011 article)
I think you could discount heavily to something close to local wage rates and still make a handsome profit in India, especially with electronic distribution reducing the distribution costs.
Does anyone else remember/use the Indian editions? I remember Tata/McGraw Hill having a series of Indian printed editions of popular texts. Local production and typesetting, lower price. Some of them even made it to the UK in the 1980s.
Anyway, I was mostly referring not to price differences but to availability differences. You can argue for or against price differentiation, but I challenge you to provide one good reason why I can purchase a movie on a DVD in my country, but not watch it on Netflix - or why that movie would become available locally months after its US premier.
> it's wrong to do market segmentation for electronic
> goods based on [..] location
I worked on an education publishing system. They were concerned about customer organisations photocopying the books. They implemented an online learning system, where each book came with one license being a serial number printed inside the cover. Now the students could tell when they were being short-changed.