America’s Supreme Court delights online retailers and appals media firms
Publishers, record labels, film studios and other content-owners are shocked.
They have often sold the same product in poorer countries for less, knowing that
it would not hurt their pricing power at home. Now it will. Big online retailers
such as Amazon and eBay could start exploiting these pricing differences on a
large scale. Ian Whittaker of Liberum Capital, a broker, thinks this ruling will
really hurt academic publishers, such as Pearson (a part-owner of The Economist). They tend to sell identical books for
eye-watering prices in America and much less in countries where people cannot
afford those prices.
