I had a similar experience with amazon and digital downloads. Region restrictions on the Internet? Really? It baffles me to no end that they do it even though it's obvious why they do it - suits are still thinking we live in the 18th century (which they probably do to be fair to them).
To give credit to Amazon, the "restriction" put in place is purely a token gesture and they do their best to not enforce it in any way. This is smart. They have to do it because unlike amazon the publishers live in some fantasy-land but they do their best to let you get around it if you want to so they can still make a sale and you can buy what you want. I'm not saying Amazon is in any way benevolent - they're just not stupid and they want to make the sale.
It's still not that obvious to me. The publishers should be in the business of maximizing their profits by selling as many copies as they can; I want to give them my money for a copy; I'm also ready to pay for the international bandwidth to have the digital bits distributed to my location (Ireland);... and yet they force the distributors to kick me out of the shop.
What are the publishers gaining by refusing international sales at a price which they are in control of setting?
It becomes even more odd that I'm normally able to buy the CD versions without any restrictions... The thing is, I wouldn't know where to stick these CD nowadays.
They sign a deal with the owner of the rights to the product which might be exclusive to a region. This is a leftover from the the days of yore. The owner for example might want to sell direct in his country, but is happy to let some other distributor sell things in another country but without cannibalising his sales so they put a restriction on where he can sell the item.
All of which makes no sense on the Internet. But we've only had the Internet for what? Two decades? I guess it'll take a few more for them to accept it. Or maybe they will succeed and recreate the borders from the real world on the Internet.
To give credit to Amazon, the "restriction" put in place is purely a token gesture and they do their best to not enforce it in any way. This is smart. They have to do it because unlike amazon the publishers live in some fantasy-land but they do their best to let you get around it if you want to so they can still make a sale and you can buy what you want. I'm not saying Amazon is in any way benevolent - they're just not stupid and they want to make the sale.