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Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

It's all the fault of Aussies themselves - if they want to fix this, they simply need to ensure (through their lawmakers) that the first sale doctrine applies fairly as intended, and within a week there will be redistributors selling legal boxed Adobe software (imported from US) for decent prices.

It wouldn't be equal to USA prices, since VAT and some markup would apply, but if there is any competition whatsoever, there won't be a markup of $1000 for a single box.

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There's nothing stopping anyone from ordering from the US (eg. on amazon), apart from the extra GST (10%) added on top by aussie customs. On Amazon its only $2166 + 10% GST

http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-65167117-CS6-Master-Collection/d...

In fact you can get the software locally for as low as $3550 if you shop around - http://www.softwaresite.com.au/adobe-software-/69-adobe-cs6-...

The main issue is the RRP (recommended retail price) put out by the developer (Adobe) which is totally ludicrous. My favourite is Microsoft AU's official RRP for the Windows 8 Pro Upgrade at AU$399. In the US its $199.

In my opinion, home users tend to shop around more and will be able to spot a bargain, but business users will probably be the ones being ripped off.

"Ripped off" is really the wrong term for the pricing discrepancy created by having different places to buy the software within one market. The better term is "price discrimination".

Business users of everything are less price sensitive so intelligent sellers of services, software, hardware etc. attempt to capitalize on them through price discrimination.

In this case, Adobe (or distributors) are aware that businesses would rather not have someone shopping around for software when they could be doing something else more productive so they would pay more. The seller is able to capture the surplus. This is a good article that at least early on focuses on inconvenience as the mechanism for price discrimination: https://www.rca.org/page.aspx?pid=2995

Because of the comment before your's, I am not sure whether Adobe is using price discrimination against Australian customers but pharmaceutical companies do price discriminate based on geographic location. (There is also a mention of this in the article above).

Effective price discrimination is a way to extract the correct price from various customers and ignores costs.

If a customer nets value by purchasing a product, the product is priced fairly to them. Different users of the same product get different values, so every seller should try to figure out a way to get price as close to the value gained for each purchase for each customer.

The effect of price discrimination is higher profits for the seller, but it also spreads the cost of R&D more fairly based on value received by buyers. Theoretically PD should drive increased innovation long term.

I've always thought first-sale doctrine is an interesting and important check on price discrimination. People usually get angry with the concept of price discrimination, it seems to grate at the idea of fairness. Poorly or improperly implemented price discrimination coupled with a strong first-sale doctrine will lead to interesting new arbitrage opportunities.

The pending case of Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc is a good example of arbitrageur vs price discriminator. The result of witch will be really important.

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