Well, in this case the depth of knowledge is not a safety issue, as it might be in someone's fireman example above.
That's debatable. Bad instructions from a navigation system can be horribly distracting, and you get plenty of bad instructions from every nav system I've ever tried while driving in London.
Otherwise, it's a barrier to entry to a restricted group of drivers so that they enjoy a monopoly and the power to price their taxi services accordingly.
Taxi fares in London are on a meter and regulated by law.
But wouldn't it make more sense for the cab driver to use a computer to find the best route?
If a computer existed that was any good at doing that, then yes. But right now, they aren't even close. You are placing way too much faith in their ability to know current traffic conditions and adapt optimally to them.
This is a theory-vs-practice issue. In theory, all of these objections could be resolved. There's no inherent technical limitation that says you couldn't do the sort of thing I assume you're imagining here. But in practice, most in-car navigation systems are pretty awful in a city like London. In many cases, even if you don't know the back roads and detours, you really are better off just planning a sensible route in advance and sticking to it unless something obviously catastrophic has happened. And if you do know the roads the way a London cabbie does, you can adapt on the fly way better than any current navigation systems anyway.
It's also a case of knowing the nature of the road.
As an obvious example, I'd estimate that my current SatNav shows an incorrect speed limit on at least 20% of roads I travel on (percentage by distance) in cities. This frequently leads to directions that I know in my own city are terrible, and I can only assume from the odd routes it often suggests in other cities that it's not doing any better there.
Even on long-distance main roads, a SatNav might not understand that the reason traffic is slowing is because of an accident, and the extra 5 minutes of delays is going to be an extra 50 minutes or 2 hours or all night by the time it's cleared. If I'd followed SatNav directions on one recent journey, instead of recognising immediately that a delay increasing at a certain rate was almost certainly due to an accident closing the road entirely, then I'd have sat on a motorway with no exits for most of that night instead of getting to my destination just a few minutes later than planned.
All of these things could be done better by the automated tools in theory, but in practice they have a very, very long way to go before they can beat the judgement of a human driver who knows the roads in the area and has some means of getting warned of unexpected disruption on the main routes.
Anyone who's tried to navigate central London using a SatNav's audible instructions knows all too well that the instructions are frequently too early, too late, or just plain confused by unusual road layouts, resulting in ambiguous or misleading spoken instructions. I have reached a point on several occasions where I have completely turned off a navigation system in London because it was not only unhelpful but actively dangerous.
I am now firmly of the view that any in-car navigation devices with sound should be required by law to feature an immediately accessible, one-touch, instant-silence button. Better yet, they should be regulated, and if they don't pass basic tests of reliability and timeliness while following randomly chosen routes so they aren't distracting and dangerous, they should be banned from sale or use, with the same penalties as driving while on the phone. Many of these systems are overpriced junk anyway, and it's about time someone called them on it given the safety implications.
Taxi drivers are regulated in London, they invest a great deal of time and money in gaining The Knowledge so they can do the job, and part of that is being required to identify efficient routes. If an inspector takes a ride and the cabbie tries what you're suggesting then their career is in real danger. There aren't many people that stupid in the industry.
You'd have to be delusional to think this is an advantage.
And yet, I've seen many reports/documentaries/reviews over the years that have objectively compared SatNavs with London cabbies, and the cabbies always win, sometimes by a comically wide margin.
Having tried to navigate central London using a top-of-the-range SatNav, including all the whizzy new real-time this and traffic report that, this result does not surprise me in the slightest. The route-planning algorithms aren't even close to the same standard as a proper London cabbie, and their real-time feeds are neither accurate enough nor fast enough to know when to stick with the main route and when to divert along the back streets.
This seems to be one of those unfortunate things (for both applicants and existing technical staff) that comes from bureaucracy as an organisation grows. As soon as you're big enough to have HR and Legal running the show in terms of recruitment, they're putting their own filters in between potentially good candidates and potentially interested technical teams within the business. That does avoid a lot of the time-wasters, but it also gets in the way of an efficient hiring process for qualified applicants.
I don't play in that playground any more, but my view when I did was that HR should restrict its screening to formalities (for example, can this person legally work here?) and objective facts about the candidate. And even then, since the objective facts most likely to be interesting are about the candidate's technical skills and experience, you still need someone who doesn't confuse Java with JavaScript and who realises that a candidate with 10 years' experience using SQL Server and MySQL can probably handle the Postgres skills you're asking for.
Your second paragraph is pretty much what they went for at one of the places I worked. Subscriptions are inherently risky for essential business software, partly because of the obvious lock-in effect and partly because of the potential for a product to be discontinued or otherwise modified in undesired ways without there being much if anything the business can do about it. For example, it's not hard to imagine an alternative version of today's story where customers using Win7 but O365 found that the latest O365 updates required Win10 to continue running and older versions of O365 would no longer work.
Even if you're an enterprise-level customer and maybe don't have the same reservations about Win10 as smaller businesses or individuals, you don't necessarily want your hand to be forced in terms of when you roll out updates to other important software just to avoid breaking dependencies, and that's what this new world of subscription-everything threatens.
So from a business continuity point of view, the new versions of Windows, Office and Exchange are all now broken due to unwanted updates and/or incompatibilities?
Sounds like we escaped the Microsoft trap just in time...
It will be absolutely hilarious if someone offended by this takes legal action that results in some sort of anti-competition ruling against Microsoft for penalising other coercive messaging software but not its own.
As someone whose small businesses really did drop Windows as a result of the Windows 10 mess (we hoarded Windows 7 boxes just before the deadline, and use other platforms since), it's not necessarily a tough shift to make these days.
Sure, if you are a big organisation heavily reliant on Windows servers and Microsoft's back office software, or if you really do need to run professional applications that are only available on Windows, you're stuck with it. However, many of those people will be running Enterprise anyway, and that's a very different system because no corporate CIO is going to accept Microsoft pushing arbitrary updates out to their systems or pulling arbitrary telemetry data back.
Sure, if you're a gamer, Windows is still the dominant PC platform. The main competition here is still consoles, not other desktop platforms.
But for SMEs, where your IT facilities are probably more carefully selected and customised to individual needs, and where maybe you're increasingly using in-house and/or cloud-based web apps for your day-to-day business admin, whether your browser runs on Windows or macOS or Linux doesn't much matter any more. For some technical or creative fields, the software available on UNIXy platforms is already comparable or better too.
I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. If you're interested in a sensible discussion and not just trolling and/or reading your personal political views into someone else's post when they aren't there, feel free to clarify.
The following are related but distinct: two statute laws are in conflict and a court must decide how to balance them, a statute law conflicts with a higher law (such as a written constitution) and automatically loses, and the effect of a statute law is changed over time by case law.
It's a question of how much a precedent is worth. In some legal systems, as I understand it, case law can eventually become strong enough to override the statutes from which it originated, thus allowing the law as a whole to evolve in the courts. In other legal systems, the original statutes are immutable and always have priority, and no matter how much case law accumulates, it is only ever a guide to interpreting the original legislation.
Although this is true, the case we're talking about today didn't involve the ECtHR, but rather the CJEU, and wasn't based on the ECHR, but rather the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights.
If Brexit involves a complete separation from the EU, neither the CJEU nor the Charter will continue to apply in the UK. The ECHR would be all that was left.
With the UK no longer a member of the EU, the one unassailable barrier to modifying the HRA and thus removing the protections of the ECHR would also be lost. It might still require national legislation to actually nerf the HRA in that way, and no doubt that would be controversial, but in any case the protections would already be weaker than they are today if the equivalent to the Charter had not been transferred into national law when Brexit happened.
However, because Britain is leaving the EU, it's unclear as to whether the British government will simply ignore the court ruling since EU laws will no longer have sway over Britain's national security policies.
This is why civil rights groups like Liberty and various MPs are concerned that ministers should not be able to substantially amend current EU laws in the process of transferring them to national law. That way, if the government wants to reduce protections for human rights or increase the state's power over its citizens, it will have to do it in the light of day, and accept the consequences if it turns out that some of those citizens don't agree and vote for someone else next time.
Judges in the UK can't strike down statutes. The legal system here is not like the US, where the law can evolve directly through the courts as well as through legislation. Our courts are strictly there to interpret existing laws and to deal with conflicts.
In this case, the point is that two laws were incompatible. On the one hand, we have the surveillance law, introduced by our national government. On the other hand, we have the EU human rights laws. The court here took the view that the former were in conflict with the latter, and the latter won.
The same could potentially have happened in a post-Brexit world where those EU laws are no longer supreme, if the equivalent safeguards are transferred into our national law as part of the Brexit process. This is something that various MPs and campaign groups are promoting heavily right now, because they are sceptical about the government's preferred plan where ministers get to transfer laws but also make some adjustments to them, ostensibly for practical reasons, but without necessarily passing primary legislation in Parliament. The loss of EU-derived safeguards for human rights, employee protections and the like is the main reason for concern here.
Of course, assuming we do leave the EU and our national law is then all we have to work with, that does mean that the elected legislature can amend those laws however they want and judges then have to rule based on the new laws. This is by design, and is part of what's called parliamentary sovereignty -- the principle that Parliament is supreme among all parts of the government and can't be overruled by the government alone, activist judges or (more historically now) other potential influences such as royalty or aristocrats.
The potential downside of this is that, yes, they can make bad laws too. The upside is that if MPs do that, there will no longer be anywhere for them to hide. If they want to pass a law that says they can do something bad to ordinary people, they're going to have to do it in public through the mechanisms of Parliament and they're going to be accountable for it at the next general election.
Fuck the ethics, it's the fairness of it. The labour market is one big global market, so why aren't the others.
If that's your ideal then I'd agree that in that case price discrimination shouldn't be necessary either. I'm not sure whether reasonable economics could ever actually result in a completely level playing field across all markets, but sure, we could be closer than we are today.
I suppose where we do differ is that I don't really see that the global labour market is one single, unified entity today. Of course there are many elements of international movement and international competition, but if the global labour market were truly a single common market, I'd be out of a job and so would almost everyone I know.
I suggest instead that there are some barriers to labour competition and some barriers to trade competition, and there are some factors affecting household income and some affecting spending power, and maybe the more interesting questions would be whether those opposing forces are roughly proportionate.
I suppose what a lot of this comes down to is that just because the cost of reproducing an electronic work may be close to zero, that very much doesn't mean that the marginal cost of selling that copy will be zero.
You seem to be objecting to market segmentation and differential pricing, on some sort of ethical basis. The trouble is, the world isn't really one big, global market where the same price makes sense everywhere.
For one thing, people in different places might have wildly different buying power. If you look past the unicorn productions that make staggering money no matter what, a lot of content might not be cost-effective to produce at all if you had to sell it everywhere at the lowest price you sold it anywhere, nor if you tried to sell it everywhere at the highest price the market would pay anywhere because many potential customers would immediately be priced out of the market.
For another, the overheads in different parts of the world can vary dramatically. My businesses are in the UK, and we would immediately make around 21% less revenue selling at the same "sticker price" to a customer in Hungary (highest VAT rate in the EU) than to a customer who is outside the scope of VAT here (so we don't need to deduct tax on that sale). If we sell to a customer in the US, we're going to have to deal with the uncertainties of exchange rates and the fees for transacting in a foreign currency, which are overheads we don't have selling to a customer who is also in the UK.
Then you have secondary markets to consider. The reason you have to pay £8 for a book from Amazon but the same book might cost less from your local charity shop is that the latter is probably a second hand copy. You have no guarantee that it will be available from there, nor do you know what physical condition it might be in. And if it is available, that's because someone bought a new copy from somewhere else first, and then donated it. The original author and editor and publishing team didn't get anything at all from that secondary sale, yet two people have enjoyed reading the book instead of one, so the cost of lost potential sales due to the secondary market has to be taken into account in the first sale price.
Maybe one day everyone in the world will live in economies with similar cost of living and purchasing power, and maybe one day we'll have simple and uniform taxation policies and overheads around the world, but if that day ever comes it will be far into the future. For now, price discrimination is an economic reality and it might be objectively justified for many different reasons depending on the circumstances. If a product is worth $3 in China and isn't worth more than $3 to you, you're welcome not to buy it at whatever higher price it's offered at, or you can move to China and pick it up for $3. But if you live in the West and you really believe your position financially is the same as a Chinese person who can only afford the $3 copy, you might be in for a nasty shock if you try that one.
The American movie industry seems to live in its own crazy world, and it's big enough to look after itself. But most content isn't produced by the American movie industry, and all the little guys have to play by the same rules too.
I want to point out that you're describing a very specific environment -- I'm guessing you're based in the US from some of the details? -- but much of what you wrote isn't how IP laws necessarily work elsewhere.
In various other places, the issues with DRM and defective physical media are covered by the same consumer protection laws as any other defective physical product, and in many cases you'd be entitled to return a product that didn't play (because of a bad DRM implementation or otherwise) for a full refund. Likewise, there have been laws on the books for a while in places like the EU that provide better consumer protections for digital/online content.
Many places also provide for some degree of backup, format shifting and so on, at least for personal use. The law is changing too slowly in this respect, IMHO. I don't have much sympathy for Big Media complaining about, say, people who already bought a song on CD wanting to put it on their phone so they can actually listen to it when they're out. I also don't have much sympathy for software companies who try to use technical measures to lock a program to a specific computer, given how often people replace their hardware. But at least the winds seem to be blowing in the right direction, and there have been moves to update laws in various places and make them more appropriate for modern technologies and behaviour. And of course the market is responding on its own as well, with most of the new subscription services being tied to the subscriber rather than the device or physical media.
I don't really have a problem with restricting acts that redistribute content to a much larger audience and on a commercial basis, like buying a CD or downloading an MP3 but then playing the music at many large public events. That's exactly the sort of scaling up without compensation where I think copyright is a reasonable economic model in the absence of anything shown to work better. In this respect, again I would point out that the anomaly that you mentioned with radio stations isn't universal.
Slashdot Mirror
Also true, though in the cases I've seen, the cabbies mostly won by a clear margin even without that benefit.
Well, in this case the depth of knowledge is not a safety issue, as it might be in someone's fireman example above.
That's debatable. Bad instructions from a navigation system can be horribly distracting, and you get plenty of bad instructions from every nav system I've ever tried while driving in London.
Otherwise, it's a barrier to entry to a restricted group of drivers so that they enjoy a monopoly and the power to price their taxi services accordingly.
Taxi fares in London are on a meter and regulated by law.
They're also surprisingly manoeuvrable, able to take passengers in wheelchairs, spacious enough for significant amounts of luggage, etc.
But wouldn't it make more sense for the cab driver to use a computer to find the best route?
If a computer existed that was any good at doing that, then yes. But right now, they aren't even close. You are placing way too much faith in their ability to know current traffic conditions and adapt optimally to them.
This is a theory-vs-practice issue. In theory, all of these objections could be resolved. There's no inherent technical limitation that says you couldn't do the sort of thing I assume you're imagining here. But in practice, most in-car navigation systems are pretty awful in a city like London. In many cases, even if you don't know the back roads and detours, you really are better off just planning a sensible route in advance and sticking to it unless something obviously catastrophic has happened. And if you do know the roads the way a London cabbie does, you can adapt on the fly way better than any current navigation systems anyway.
It's also a case of knowing the nature of the road.
As an obvious example, I'd estimate that my current SatNav shows an incorrect speed limit on at least 20% of roads I travel on (percentage by distance) in cities. This frequently leads to directions that I know in my own city are terrible, and I can only assume from the odd routes it often suggests in other cities that it's not doing any better there.
Even on long-distance main roads, a SatNav might not understand that the reason traffic is slowing is because of an accident, and the extra 5 minutes of delays is going to be an extra 50 minutes or 2 hours or all night by the time it's cleared. If I'd followed SatNav directions on one recent journey, instead of recognising immediately that a delay increasing at a certain rate was almost certainly due to an accident closing the road entirely, then I'd have sat on a motorway with no exits for most of that night instead of getting to my destination just a few minutes later than planned.
All of these things could be done better by the automated tools in theory, but in practice they have a very, very long way to go before they can beat the judgement of a human driver who knows the roads in the area and has some means of getting warned of unexpected disruption on the main routes.
Autonomous solutions will make these arguments look as outdated as an engineer arguing a sliderule over a calculator.
Eventually, yes, but despite the hype, we are clearly still a long way from that level of technology today.
Anyone who's tried to navigate central London using a SatNav's audible instructions knows all too well that the instructions are frequently too early, too late, or just plain confused by unusual road layouts, resulting in ambiguous or misleading spoken instructions. I have reached a point on several occasions where I have completely turned off a navigation system in London because it was not only unhelpful but actively dangerous.
I am now firmly of the view that any in-car navigation devices with sound should be required by law to feature an immediately accessible, one-touch, instant-silence button. Better yet, they should be regulated, and if they don't pass basic tests of reliability and timeliness while following randomly chosen routes so they aren't distracting and dangerous, they should be banned from sale or use, with the same penalties as driving while on the phone. Many of these systems are overpriced junk anyway, and it's about time someone called them on it given the safety implications.
Taxi drivers are regulated in London, they invest a great deal of time and money in gaining The Knowledge so they can do the job, and part of that is being required to identify efficient routes. If an inspector takes a ride and the cabbie tries what you're suggesting then their career is in real danger. There aren't many people that stupid in the industry.
You'd have to be delusional to think this is an advantage.
And yet, I've seen many reports/documentaries/reviews over the years that have objectively compared SatNavs with London cabbies, and the cabbies always win, sometimes by a comically wide margin.
Having tried to navigate central London using a top-of-the-range SatNav, including all the whizzy new real-time this and traffic report that, this result does not surprise me in the slightest. The route-planning algorithms aren't even close to the same standard as a proper London cabbie, and their real-time feeds are neither accurate enough nor fast enough to know when to stick with the main route and when to divert along the back streets.
This seems to be one of those unfortunate things (for both applicants and existing technical staff) that comes from bureaucracy as an organisation grows. As soon as you're big enough to have HR and Legal running the show in terms of recruitment, they're putting their own filters in between potentially good candidates and potentially interested technical teams within the business. That does avoid a lot of the time-wasters, but it also gets in the way of an efficient hiring process for qualified applicants.
I don't play in that playground any more, but my view when I did was that HR should restrict its screening to formalities (for example, can this person legally work here?) and objective facts about the candidate. And even then, since the objective facts most likely to be interesting are about the candidate's technical skills and experience, you still need someone who doesn't confuse Java with JavaScript and who realises that a candidate with 10 years' experience using SQL Server and MySQL can probably handle the Postgres skills you're asking for.
Your second paragraph is pretty much what they went for at one of the places I worked. Subscriptions are inherently risky for essential business software, partly because of the obvious lock-in effect and partly because of the potential for a product to be discontinued or otherwise modified in undesired ways without there being much if anything the business can do about it. For example, it's not hard to imagine an alternative version of today's story where customers using Win7 but O365 found that the latest O365 updates required Win10 to continue running and older versions of O365 would no longer work.
Even if you're an enterprise-level customer and maybe don't have the same reservations about Win10 as smaller businesses or individuals, you don't necessarily want your hand to be forced in terms of when you roll out updates to other important software just to avoid breaking dependencies, and that's what this new world of subscription-everything threatens.
So from a business continuity point of view, the new versions of Windows, Office and Exchange are all now broken due to unwanted updates and/or incompatibilities?
Sounds like we escaped the Microsoft trap just in time...
It will be absolutely hilarious if someone offended by this takes legal action that results in some sort of anti-competition ruling against Microsoft for penalising other coercive messaging software but not its own.
As someone whose small businesses really did drop Windows as a result of the Windows 10 mess (we hoarded Windows 7 boxes just before the deadline, and use other platforms since), it's not necessarily a tough shift to make these days.
Sure, if you are a big organisation heavily reliant on Windows servers and Microsoft's back office software, or if you really do need to run professional applications that are only available on Windows, you're stuck with it. However, many of those people will be running Enterprise anyway, and that's a very different system because no corporate CIO is going to accept Microsoft pushing arbitrary updates out to their systems or pulling arbitrary telemetry data back.
Sure, if you're a gamer, Windows is still the dominant PC platform. The main competition here is still consoles, not other desktop platforms.
But for SMEs, where your IT facilities are probably more carefully selected and customised to individual needs, and where maybe you're increasingly using in-house and/or cloud-based web apps for your day-to-day business admin, whether your browser runs on Windows or macOS or Linux doesn't much matter any more. For some technical or creative fields, the software available on UNIXy platforms is already comparable or better too.
The beatings^Wbroken updates will continue until morale improves.
I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. If you're interested in a sensible discussion and not just trolling and/or reading your personal political views into someone else's post when they aren't there, feel free to clarify.
The following are related but distinct: two statute laws are in conflict and a court must decide how to balance them, a statute law conflicts with a higher law (such as a written constitution) and automatically loses, and the effect of a statute law is changed over time by case law.
It's a question of how much a precedent is worth. In some legal systems, as I understand it, case law can eventually become strong enough to override the statutes from which it originated, thus allowing the law as a whole to evolve in the courts. In other legal systems, the original statutes are immutable and always have priority, and no matter how much case law accumulates, it is only ever a guide to interpreting the original legislation.
Although this is true, the case we're talking about today didn't involve the ECtHR, but rather the CJEU, and wasn't based on the ECHR, but rather the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights.
If Brexit involves a complete separation from the EU, neither the CJEU nor the Charter will continue to apply in the UK. The ECHR would be all that was left.
With the UK no longer a member of the EU, the one unassailable barrier to modifying the HRA and thus removing the protections of the ECHR would also be lost. It might still require national legislation to actually nerf the HRA in that way, and no doubt that would be controversial, but in any case the protections would already be weaker than they are today if the equivalent to the Charter had not been transferred into national law when Brexit happened.
However, because Britain is leaving the EU, it's unclear as to whether the British government will simply ignore the court ruling since EU laws will no longer have sway over Britain's national security policies.
This is why civil rights groups like Liberty and various MPs are concerned that ministers should not be able to substantially amend current EU laws in the process of transferring them to national law. That way, if the government wants to reduce protections for human rights or increase the state's power over its citizens, it will have to do it in the light of day, and accept the consequences if it turns out that some of those citizens don't agree and vote for someone else next time.
Judges in the UK can't strike down statutes. The legal system here is not like the US, where the law can evolve directly through the courts as well as through legislation. Our courts are strictly there to interpret existing laws and to deal with conflicts.
In this case, the point is that two laws were incompatible. On the one hand, we have the surveillance law, introduced by our national government. On the other hand, we have the EU human rights laws. The court here took the view that the former were in conflict with the latter, and the latter won.
The same could potentially have happened in a post-Brexit world where those EU laws are no longer supreme, if the equivalent safeguards are transferred into our national law as part of the Brexit process. This is something that various MPs and campaign groups are promoting heavily right now, because they are sceptical about the government's preferred plan where ministers get to transfer laws but also make some adjustments to them, ostensibly for practical reasons, but without necessarily passing primary legislation in Parliament. The loss of EU-derived safeguards for human rights, employee protections and the like is the main reason for concern here.
Of course, assuming we do leave the EU and our national law is then all we have to work with, that does mean that the elected legislature can amend those laws however they want and judges then have to rule based on the new laws. This is by design, and is part of what's called parliamentary sovereignty -- the principle that Parliament is supreme among all parts of the government and can't be overruled by the government alone, activist judges or (more historically now) other potential influences such as royalty or aristocrats.
The potential downside of this is that, yes, they can make bad laws too. The upside is that if MPs do that, there will no longer be anywhere for them to hide. If they want to pass a law that says they can do something bad to ordinary people, they're going to have to do it in public through the mechanisms of Parliament and they're going to be accountable for it at the next general election.
Fuck the ethics, it's the fairness of it. The labour market is one big global market, so why aren't the others.
If that's your ideal then I'd agree that in that case price discrimination shouldn't be necessary either. I'm not sure whether reasonable economics could ever actually result in a completely level playing field across all markets, but sure, we could be closer than we are today.
I suppose where we do differ is that I don't really see that the global labour market is one single, unified entity today. Of course there are many elements of international movement and international competition, but if the global labour market were truly a single common market, I'd be out of a job and so would almost everyone I know.
I suggest instead that there are some barriers to labour competition and some barriers to trade competition, and there are some factors affecting household income and some affecting spending power, and maybe the more interesting questions would be whether those opposing forces are roughly proportionate.
I suppose what a lot of this comes down to is that just because the cost of reproducing an electronic work may be close to zero, that very much doesn't mean that the marginal cost of selling that copy will be zero.
You seem to be objecting to market segmentation and differential pricing, on some sort of ethical basis. The trouble is, the world isn't really one big, global market where the same price makes sense everywhere.
For one thing, people in different places might have wildly different buying power. If you look past the unicorn productions that make staggering money no matter what, a lot of content might not be cost-effective to produce at all if you had to sell it everywhere at the lowest price you sold it anywhere, nor if you tried to sell it everywhere at the highest price the market would pay anywhere because many potential customers would immediately be priced out of the market.
For another, the overheads in different parts of the world can vary dramatically. My businesses are in the UK, and we would immediately make around 21% less revenue selling at the same "sticker price" to a customer in Hungary (highest VAT rate in the EU) than to a customer who is outside the scope of VAT here (so we don't need to deduct tax on that sale). If we sell to a customer in the US, we're going to have to deal with the uncertainties of exchange rates and the fees for transacting in a foreign currency, which are overheads we don't have selling to a customer who is also in the UK.
Then you have secondary markets to consider. The reason you have to pay £8 for a book from Amazon but the same book might cost less from your local charity shop is that the latter is probably a second hand copy. You have no guarantee that it will be available from there, nor do you know what physical condition it might be in. And if it is available, that's because someone bought a new copy from somewhere else first, and then donated it. The original author and editor and publishing team didn't get anything at all from that secondary sale, yet two people have enjoyed reading the book instead of one, so the cost of lost potential sales due to the secondary market has to be taken into account in the first sale price.
Maybe one day everyone in the world will live in economies with similar cost of living and purchasing power, and maybe one day we'll have simple and uniform taxation policies and overheads around the world, but if that day ever comes it will be far into the future. For now, price discrimination is an economic reality and it might be objectively justified for many different reasons depending on the circumstances. If a product is worth $3 in China and isn't worth more than $3 to you, you're welcome not to buy it at whatever higher price it's offered at, or you can move to China and pick it up for $3. But if you live in the West and you really believe your position financially is the same as a Chinese person who can only afford the $3 copy, you might be in for a nasty shock if you try that one.
The American movie industry seems to live in its own crazy world, and it's big enough to look after itself. But most content isn't produced by the American movie industry, and all the little guys have to play by the same rules too.
I want to point out that you're describing a very specific environment -- I'm guessing you're based in the US from some of the details? -- but much of what you wrote isn't how IP laws necessarily work elsewhere.
In various other places, the issues with DRM and defective physical media are covered by the same consumer protection laws as any other defective physical product, and in many cases you'd be entitled to return a product that didn't play (because of a bad DRM implementation or otherwise) for a full refund. Likewise, there have been laws on the books for a while in places like the EU that provide better consumer protections for digital/online content.
Many places also provide for some degree of backup, format shifting and so on, at least for personal use. The law is changing too slowly in this respect, IMHO. I don't have much sympathy for Big Media complaining about, say, people who already bought a song on CD wanting to put it on their phone so they can actually listen to it when they're out. I also don't have much sympathy for software companies who try to use technical measures to lock a program to a specific computer, given how often people replace their hardware. But at least the winds seem to be blowing in the right direction, and there have been moves to update laws in various places and make them more appropriate for modern technologies and behaviour. And of course the market is responding on its own as well, with most of the new subscription services being tied to the subscriber rather than the device or physical media.
I don't really have a problem with restricting acts that redistribute content to a much larger audience and on a commercial basis, like buying a CD or downloading an MP3 but then playing the music at many large public events. That's exactly the sort of scaling up without compensation where I think copyright is a reasonable economic model in the absence of anything shown to work better. In this respect, again I would point out that the anomaly that you mentioned with radio stations isn't universal.