Hacker News Reader

Comment by WhaleBiologist | Hacker News Reader

Once upon a time, the Australian dollar was worth about 50 US cents, so things in Australia cost about double what it cost in the US. Then the Australian economy started booming, and now the AUD is stronger than the USD. But everyone who sells stuff in Australia thought "wait a minute, these guys are used to paying double, so what incentive do we have to change?".

So now you have retarded pricing, like some places expecting you to pay $110 US dollars for a single video game. Don't even get me started on the price of food. Unless Australian retailers change their tactics, they will slowly go out of business, because an entire generation of computer literate people realize you can get 2-3x more out of your money just by buying from online stores.

View on HN

> Unless Australian retailers change their tactics, they will slowly go out of business, because an entire generation of computer literate people realize you can get 2-3x more out of your money just by buying from online stores.

Buying online from overseas only works until the government put in place laws to prevent circumvention of technical rights protection measures. Like the DMCA in the US, or " European Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the council of May 22, 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society." in EU.

That means that turning your DVD into a region free player is illegal; chipping a console so it can play region locked games is illegal; etc.

It feels like a big scam.

Australian law explicitly allows for consumers to circumvent region locking. Of course, this doesn't mean this can't change, but at least there's explicit precedent allowing it.

Quote from the Attorney General's department:

“An access control TPM specifically excludes TPMs which control geographic market segmentation. This means that consumers will be able to circumvent the region coding TPMs on legitimate DVDs purchased overseas. It also allows for the continued availability of region-free DVD players.”

TPM is a term from the US/Australian Free-Trade Agreement.

More information: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/blogs/gadgets-o...

It can't cost more than $10 to ship a video game from the US to Australia, if you ship in bulk.

So make a startup that buys video games at retail, in bulk, in the US, ships them to Australia, and retails them there.

Everybody'll buy from you because you're so much cheaper, but you'll still have enough margin to make a good profit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com