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Sony's Win a Major Blow for Importers
Joan Cross writes "Sony won a battle in the UK Courts over the importing to Europe of Playstation Portables by Lik Sang. They say that 'Ultimately, we're trying to protect consumers from being sold hardware that does not conform to strict EU or UK consumer safety standards, due to voltage supply differences et cetera'. Of course, the PSP comes supplied with a 100-240v adapter which is safe worldwide. Lik Sang has posted their reaction to the court decision. Could be bad news for those wanting PS3 Consoles on import."
Price Japan will export just about anything Japanese to anyone in the world. Some years ago I bought a Sony HS-20 video projector from that site, because it wasn't available in the US at the time. It still works just great. But perhaps court judgments like this will ultimately kill companies like Price Japan.
So, does this mean that Sony can legally prevent private international re-sale of their product line too? Where is the demark line between what is and what is not permissible?
Why should these companies realistically care anyway? It's not like consumers are buying those crappy knock-offs of consoles you could get during the days of the SNES. And as for safety reasons? What the hell? How would Sony be liable? Most hardware I've bought contains pages and pages of legalese saying where it's intend for use in, what voltage it takes etc. The fact is, this is all about control. Companies are scared of not having 100% control over where customers get their products from. If they really want to regain control, they should try not only equalizing prices, but actually ensuring there's a simultaneous release of their products across the world. Releasing the PS3 in March in the UK certainly doesn't help things.
As for Sony's comments that the PS3 'will not play European Blu-Ray movies or DVDs', I wouldn't buy a PS3 or a X-Box 360 for playing HD DVDs. Certainly, neither's HD facility will be region-free. And there are myriad titles that never get released in a certain region. Unless you only have an interest in watching mainstream blockbusters, a region-free player is a must. And the PS2's DVD performance was laughable. Not because it was poor quality, but because when you tried to watch any film in RGB mode, it green tinted the picture. Apparently this was some kind of copy protection measure. Yes, even though DVDs have macrovision. Who's to say the PS3 won't have some daft similar limitation.
Either way, neither is correct. The original word is "kouchie". Musical Youth Group changed the lyrics to keep the drug references to a minimum for kids.
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And that's not just a UK problem. Lots of identical things change price very much from one country to another. The problem seems similar in Canada at least.
I personally order most of my photo gear from the USA (grey market) or Hong Kong. I routinely save hundreds on a half decent lens (usually save ~1/3 of local price, or ~300$ on a 1000$ lens). Just bought a nice espresso machine a month ago. I saved almost half ordering it from the USA than buying it locally. Computer hardware? We have far better deals than some other countries have (like a guy from Egypt I saw talking about his local prices), but I keep seeing things like "I've bought this 400GB HD for 50$ after mail in rebate" or such (from some USA retailer like newegg), which is often FAR better than we can hope for (320GB HDs are ~130$CDN here, still not too bad). Often comparing the price of electronics (e.g. PS3), it often costs far more than the price of similar item in the USA * exchange rate (IIRC the PS3 is like 200$ more).
If it was even near the same price to buy locally, I would. But when I can save a few hundreds of my hard-earned money on a single item, even after paying LOTS on international shipping/insurance/customs clearance... It adds up really quick. I save a few thousands a year that way.
And then there's all the companies restricting their stuff to regions - e.g. DVD region coding (most of my DVDs are PAL/R2 imports, just because they don't even sell those shows here).
Ah but this europe. In particular the UK the dollar is very weak at the moment I get nearly 2 USD for 1 GBP when I import DVDs from the states, other countries vary but generally providing you manage to bypass import duty & VAT* you can save a great deal of money.
Unfortunately thats why the R2 UK anime market is so feeble - it is a lot cheaper to buy R1 DVDs which often are released months (years) earlier.
[*] = Very random depend on the customs - sometimes stuff over the threshold will get through untaxed - I had $100 parcel come through untaxed and have yet to get stung for importing Japanese DVDs & CDs. NB the UK threshold is 18GBP which tends to be 30-36USD depending how weak the dollar is.
I don't think there is anything exempt from VAT in Sweden except books (and that just happened a few years ago). I think some kinds of entertainment like concerts and the like are "only" 6%. But there are taxes on everything else.
If you like taxes Sweden is the place to go. First you the employer pays a tax for having an employee (it's basically hidden income tax). Then the worker gets to pay income tax of about 30-40%. Then you have VAT and the other nice little taxes. All those taxes ammounts to about 60% of the average persons income. The ammount of taxation of the BNP is a little more than 49%. Some things are even taxed several times. First theres a tax on gas then you pay VAT on the total cost including the original tax. The same goes for things like electricity and tobacco.
The best part is that the VAT was supposed to be temporary and originally was 5% if i remmeber correctly.
The game console industry always has interesting business models
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It would be useful to know exactly what law had been broken - the links that I can find just quote the judge saying that "the offer for sale had taken place not in Hong Kong but in the EEA". Is this just "Asda and Tesco vs Levi" again?
/ cmselect/cmtrdind/380/38009.htm
i cy-issues-trademarks/policy-issues-trademarks-para llel/policy-issues-trademarks-parallel-parallelcas elaw.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1261829.stm
has a summary of that (grey imports from the rest of the EEA legal; elsewhere not)
Also see:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199899
http://www.patent.gov.uk/policy/policy-issues/pol
has a link to the judgement (those last two links may cause you to lose the will to stay awake, though).
If it IS just a trademark issue, what's to prevent some sort of "Iceweasel" solution to this? For example advertise the consoles as being of certain dimensions and able to play certain titles - but no more.
As a heads up ... in the UK you can usually guess a products price by using the dollar price. Effectively we're paying nearly twice as much as in the US. And we usually wait about 6 months longer to have a product available.
Doesn't matter to me. I can only afford one meal a day anyway.
Yes, Euro PSPs and JP PSPs are exactly the same (right down to the 100-240V power adapter). Although possibly it's because the JP PSP isn't certified for Europe (for example, my VAIO bought from Japan has no FCC or European certification, only Japanese VCCI certification even though it's exactly the same as its US counterpart) because Sony didn't think about selling it outside Japan. It's sad that Lik-Sang can't sell PSPs in Europe anymore just because Sony made up some excuse (they profit a lot more off of Euro sales, I imagine). Most likely this will mean someone just goes to Japan, buys a bunch of PSPs(Wii/Xbox360/whatever), and sells them to his/her friends instead of ordering online.
OSx86 FTW
Argentina & Uruguay (my country - South America) also pay VAT and/or other taxes on food (23% for most stuff, 14% on other). We do follow Spain's lead (unfortunately)
On the other hand, we have some legislation stating that if a company is already importing something (the PSP in this case), you can do paralell imports (or something to the effect) under the "Exhaustion of rights"
As usual, Wikipedia has a neat article on the subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_import
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_of_rights
It's part of a debate which is still happening, the EU is against it, but I would be for it (without having looked too much into it, I'm mostly favorable to fre trade and globalization means most of these barriers are artificial anyways).
Another nice link from New Zealand (a country that's often quoted as exemplary):
http://www.med.govt.nz/templates/Page____1230.asp
Too bad the cinemas won there (see last part).
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Maybe they were ditching DS stock... I was looking to buy a DS-Lite this week and everywhere was £109 with one game... Except Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nintendo-Lite-Handheld-Con sole-Black/dp/B000FTQR8K/sr=8-4/qid=1161553768/ref =pd_bbs_sr_4/026-1104481-1180463?ie=UTF8 . But all the local shops were 109.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC