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Comment by inopinatus | Hacker News Reader

Nothing is wrong with it. There's no basic human entitlement to a cheap copy of Adobe Photoshop, so the ethical dimension here is extremely limited, and I'm disappointed to see you're being downvoted for making a very salient point.

I have no sympathy for those of my fellow Australians who think they have some valid complaint that the price of digital assets is "too high".

Australians simply do have a higher willingness to pay, and lower price elasticity of demand, for a whole host of economic reasons. Companies charge the price that maximises their returns, and this means price segmentation wherever it is legal.

Moreover it is, of course, also impossible to legislate against: the same laws would effectively peg the Australian dollar. This is just political grandstanding; nothing will change.

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> Moreover it is, of course, also impossible to legislate against: the same laws would effectively peg the Australian dollar.

I don't get to say this often on HN: what utter rot.

When parallel importation of CDs and movies was abolished, the dollar didn't give a damn.

When region encoding was dropped on us via the AUSFTA Chapter 17, the dollar nary stirred.

The AUD is a small rowboat that navigates between the Scyalla of Chinese iron ore demand and the Charybdis of Ben Bernanke's public nut-scratching.

Irrelevant. You simply cannot frame laws that will be effective at preventing the transborder price segmentation of digital assets without anything less stringent than pegging the currency, or at least the price level.

Do you have hot and cold running nonsense where you live?

Selling to Australians takes place in Australian dollars and the transactions are cleared by Australian banks. This makes them pretty easy to get a legal grip on.

And you will also find that the large companies who are doing most of the price discrimination have local subsidiaries which can be dragged into court without too much fuss. If they try something like yanking funds to avoid court judgements, they're violating various laws and privileges and our government can and would be able to seek enforcement from courts in the USA.

People think that trading across boundaries gives you magical immunity from national laws. It doesn't. Where you have a nexus with a country, you can be enforced against through that nexus. Where the laws are similar, brother courts will typically reciprocally enforce them.

If you allow parallel importation then you are in most cases obviating the need for a local subsidiary. Service? Sales? Support? Not a problem. Just contract it out.

And the Australian government is not going to take legal action in the US to create border import tariffs.

I continue to be astounded by all the self-righteous outraged people here demanding cheaper Photoshop and cheaper Steam games like it was some basic human right.

> If you allow parallel importation then you are in most cases obviating the need for a local subsidiary. Service? Sales? Support? Not a problem. Just contract it out.

That is not the observed and observable outcome of parallel importation in other goods.

> And the Australian government is not going to take legal action in the US to create border import tariffs.

Your terminology is incorrect. It's not a tariff. Making geo-segmentation harder or illegal is not a tax on imported goods.

> I continue to be astounded by all the self-righteous outraged people here demanding cheaper Photoshop and cheaper Steam games like it was some basic human right.

I'm likewise astounded that people think Australia's quite utilitarian, transactional political culture is going cleave to any particular ideological position.

Not necessarily true. Steam Australia, for instance, sells in USD.

Allowing parallel importation would be a good start, Gerry Harvey be damned.

There is no entitlement to it, but we're not talking of a free market. Adobe has a legal privilege to punish retailers who may undercut them via "parallel import" and it's a crime to circumvent DRM. Without those legal privileges, a free market would work by bringing prices of like goods in line.

Photoshop is neither a commodity nor an essential good; please explain why a free market needs to exist for it.

Please explain why a free market shouldn't exist for Photoshop?

I didn't say it shouldn't; I'm suggesting there's no reason why it must.

Australian voters desiring a free market for Photoshop in Australia indisputably is a good reason for that.

Is not a good reason. People will always vote themselves more bread & circuses.

It seems (to me) that there should be a good reason before a restraint is place on trade. I can get behind restraints on food prices, but Photoshop?

Judging from Japan a serious recession and growth slowing will stop it and it will be followed by 20 years of deflation. Australia is probably near the end of the 20 year boom, price elasticity will shift at some point. Good time to start businesses based on this perhaps.

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