Comixology US Shuts The Door On UK Buyers

[FalloutJack]

Well, that's one company that's going to find itself severely dissappointed in the future. Heh, no pattern recognition, at all.

 

[L. Declis]

THIS is why piracy keeps on existing.

How can someone BUY what they want, when companies keep screwing them?

I have money.
They have product.
Anything that interferes in that exchange is bad for both the consumers and the seller.

Totally agree with you there. Take "Cards Against Humanity". I tried to import it from the US. I tried to get a friend to buy and send it over. In the end, I printed it out.

But the MOMENT it was released in the UK, I grabbed it. And all three expansions. Because I finally could.

THIS is why piracy keeps on existing.

No, it's not, it's just one of the biggest examples of why there is a demand for it.

Look, I'm the biggest piracy apologist there is: let's legalize all filesharing, trim copyright law, and in the meantime, treat broken laws like feeble suggestions, the whole shebang. But let's not pretend that if the files were purchaseable everywhere, piracy would drop to 0 units.

I'd argue there will always be a small fraction of people who would rather steal than pay for anything. However, the vast majority of people just want what they want when they want it. For example, I know a bunch of people who wouldn't normally pirate anything who give in to temptation because they have to wait 5 months to see Downton Abbey. ITV's insistance on this unnecessary delay is creating a market for people to steal who would otherwise happily pay for access via Amazon or what have you. (Or watch it on PBS.)

This is true. I watched How I Met Your Mother online. I watched Big Bang Theory online. I watch Archer online, and same with Bob's Burgers. Same with Adventure Time.

I watch them online because I simply cannot watch them anywhere else. I pick up the DVDs as soon as I can when they release nearly a year later, but I watch them online when they come out because it is frustrating to be constantly told to wait when they have to translate it from English to English!

I recently watched Sherlock Holmes on DVD. It had 25 minutes of unskippable cutscenes. Me and my girlfriend had already finished our food by the time the film started. You know where I don't have to watch 25 minutes of adverts on a DVD I have already purchased? The internet.

We'll never get rid of piracy any more than we'll get rid of, say, measles. But policies people pursue can encourage problems, or mitigate them. Just like mass vaccination essentially reduces diseases like measles to negligible, so too would simply making content available conveniently and when it's in demand protect entertainment companies against the piracy virus. And just like antivaxxers have managed to help create new outbreaks of measles (the dicks), the insistence on pretending the Internet doesn't exist has helped create new markets for piracy. Also, apologies for the hackneyed metaphor.

But there is this habit that media companies have when they seem to punish those who purchase it. Take my DVD example above. Why am I being lectured on buying DVDs? I bought your DVD. I'm not the people you should be targeting. Same with video games. It's not the pirated copy which forced SimCity to be online when my internet is terrible, so I was simply unable to buy it because it would not literally work.

For the sake of the mods, I clarify, no, I haven't downloaded it either, I just bought SimCity 4. Which brings me onto the next point; I bought SimCity 4. Because I could. Because it was there and didn't punish me so I bought it and they got £5 they would never have seen. Everyone involved was happy.

Same with music. Ever since iTunes came into power, I haven't pirated a single music track. I haven't used Limewire at all. And I don't need to. Offering me cheap access to the music I like? Convenient? Then I buy it. I must have spent about £150 on music last year, because I could. Because they don't punish me for wanting to buy it.

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

Why don't media companies realize the world has shrunk with the mass adoption of the internet? It may be contract disputes with local distributors and international copyright laws. But they need to fix that bureaucratic pile of red tape that's screwing over the honest public. Maybe Amazon will dig Comixology out of the the hole they trapped themselves in and set a precedent for better service.

It's a service issue why piracy is so big. Most people would pay a reasonable price for content they want. This is why Game of Thrones was rated the number one tv show pirated online recently. HBO wouldn't provide paid online streaming to people who's local cable/satellite companies didn't have HBO. Anime studios and their localization partners host new subbed episodes straight from Japan, and it's quite a successful practice. I'm willing to bet music piracy dropped as more decent download services opened up with DRM free mp3s. The music and movie industries won't admit it because they think it's a disease and they the perfect brilliant medical researchers destined to cure it, when they just incredibly greedy.

 

[RossaLincoln]

Even so, British comic buyers are now largely locked out of purchasing whatever they like, using (I might add) legal tender, unless the comic in question has been expressly made available for the UK internet.

You do know that British currency is not legal tender in the US, right? ... Inflammatory bias or ignorance?

Anyway, between the issues with exchange rates, international taxation, and the UK trying to control the internet this doesn't surprise me one bit.

Sorry, I was imprecise. I meant to say that it is not illegal to convert pounds to dollars in a transaction online. Credit card companies do this routinely. Obviously I recognize that gbp isnt accepted in a brick and mortar store. But your british credit card sure as hell would be. Again, sorry for needlessly confusing my own point.

 

[Sarge034]

Sorry, I was imprecise. I meant to say that it is not illegal to convert pounds to dollars in a transaction online. Credit card companies do this routinely. Obviously I recognize that gbp isnt accepted in a brick and mortar store. But your british credit card sure as hell would be. Again, sorry for needlessly confusing my own point.

Now that is sorted you do know that the reason the vast majority of stores in the US, or based in the US for online companies, only accept US currency is because the company is the one being charged the exchange fee and taking the hit if the exchange rate is not in the USD's favor. Add in international taxation, domestic taxation, international censorship requirements, and localization efforts I can see why a company would set up a domestic branch in the country they would be serving. Is it odd that both stores don't have the same content? Yes and no. Some content could be regionally locked due to publisher (or other) contractual agreements, some content might break regional censorship laws, who knows? But going into this story simply with a "row row, fight the power" attitude and not finding out why things are the way they are is very telling and does nothing but kick the hornets nest for the sake of kicking it.