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Does anybody know? – International rights
January 17, 2010 | 11:41 am
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By Paul Biba
The following question came in from Mary McManus:
I don’t understand e-book sales restrictions. We are hearing more and more from Kindle buyers outside the US that they are unable to purchase certain e-books and are given the message on Amazon that the book is not available in your country. I have run into this many times with print books from the UK which are not available here, so I just buy them at Amazon UK and they are sent to me. If I wanted a book published in France, I assume that I could do the same from a French site. Or any other country in the free world. If I can buy a print book which has not been published in the U.S., why not an e-book? Can anyone point me to the explanation of this?
Any other questions? Send them on to me.
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Comments:
I suspect this is nothing more than a restriction placed by the retailer. True there are different publishing dates for books within the EU and US but once it’s out its out and there are no restrictions on purchase. As you imply, from the UK I can buy from a US retailer when I desire. Think back to the 1980s and the crazy ‘Spycatcher’ book nonsense. Unpublishable in the UK but still purchasable because the books were brought in from other countries.
I suspect this is a Amazon restriction not a publishing one. If the restriction was between UK and France it would probably (although not certainly) break single market rules. Between the US and EU though, I would believe this is retailer issue. They aren’t bound to sell the product to you, it’s ultimately their choice who they sell to.
Whereas a regular book store will be buying paper books through a distributor, ebooks are (right now) often sold directly from the publisher to the ebook store. The ebook store has to act as both a publisher and store front, and the sales contract they make with the publisher is much stricter than they’d get going through a normal distributor. The ebook market is also fairly small at the moment, which makes it also a lot easier to enforce region sale restrictions.
These rules are actually broken quite often by paper book distributors, but the industry tends to turn a blind eye to it since it usually just means they make more money. Due to the logistics involved in exporting/importing paper books, the loss of sales aren’t that large that it hurts authors’ chances of selling a book in a foreign market, which means authors and their agents haven’t really been pushing for it to stop. There’s been some exceptions of course, but in general that’s how it works.
> The ebook store has to act as both a publisher and store front
That should say “The ebook store has to act as both a distributor and store front”. Sorry about the typo
Has anyone tried using a “proxy”?
As I understand the explanation I was given, the “point of sale” for a physical book is the cash register of the store selling it. The presumption is that the retailer takes your money and delivers the book right there. The sale is recorded there; taxes are paid there. It doesn’t matter if you were physically there, or if the transaction was by mail.
The “point of sale” of an ebook is conventionally the location of the computer terminal you order and pay for it from. I do not know where this convention comes from.
Hence you can mailorder a book from the US from a UK retailer with no problems (ignoring customs), but ordering an ebook from the same retailer may run into geographical restrictions. Some people apparently do successfully use proxies.
Regards,
Jack Tingle
It all boils down to territorial contractual rights. The publisher contracts specific rights in their contract with the author. Those rights involve the language of the right — English only, specific other languages, or all language translation rights. Territorial rights are the parts of the world where the book can be sold.
Most paper book contracts from the conglomerate publishers, until recently, covered North American English rights. In other words, the contract was for the English language book sold in the US and Canada.
Recently, world English rights are more common.
The publisher then signs a contract with distributors as to where the distributor can and can’t distribute a book. There are also International laws which cover the import and export of books.
A few weeks ago, there was a story in the trade press about American booksellers buying a British author’s book online to sell in their stores because the American version wasn’t due out for some time. A number of publishers reminded these booksellers that they were breaking the law by doing so because of those contractual territory agreements.
Why are all these territorial agreements necessary? Most have their roots in paper book publishing, and the global marketplace that is e-publishing is only slowly beginning to change the way the publishers and distributors are writing their new contracts. Older contracts are rarely worth enough to pay for the legal costs of a new contract with wider territorial rights.
Also, the digital version of books are a very tiny portion of a publisher’s income from those books, and they don’t wish to undercut their paper partners — distributors, bookstores, etc.
For more information on territorial rights, I suggest this article.
http://www.ivanhoffman.com/territorial.html
I’ve just experienced these territorial restrictions with mp3 downloads from Amazon. I believe it has something to do with the contracts as @Marilynn said (thx for the link). And I’m almost certain that the publishers and labels insist on keeping these restrictions in force. Look at the price difference between mp3 albums in amazon.com and amazon.co.uk for instance. The US price is lower (as a result stronger competition I believe). This helps the copyright owners and global retailers to extract more revenue from the markets with weaker competition.
To answer the question about “proxies”. First: I’m not a lawyer, but it might be illegal (copyright violation). What I’m saying here is for your information, I’m not encouraging anybody to violate the law. Second: proxies work only in the browser, so if you have an application (like Amazon MP3 Downloader) or a device (like Kindle) that talks to retailer’s server, proxies won’t work. You would need a VPN service. Check out http://www.how-to-hide-ip.info/ for more information. Third: some service providers block known IP addresses of VPN services/proxies (like Hulu does and I guess amazon.com as well). So, even if you happen to purchase a VPN Service it might turn out that you won’t be able to watch/download geographically restricted content from them.
I will add, that proxies and VPNs are exactly the same techniques the Chinese use to bypass Great Firewall there to enjoy our freedom of speech. The copyright owners would be better served giving it some thought.
Back in the early 1980s I would buy cheap Spanish imports of vinyl record albums like _Best of Jimi Hendrix_. (Spain was poor and record companies gave them a lower rate.) What started happening is US record stores would import cheap Spanish and Mexican albums and offer them to US consumer. The IP holders got laws passed to ban imports that are similar to copyrighted US products.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_import
http://boingboing.net/2009/12/16/major-record-labels-1.html
http://www.out-law.com/page-4188