Is it just me, or is it a bit odd that copyright is used for market control in regards to importation and exportation? I thought most countries used tariffs to produce this effect.
If you want to stop people from buying TV's cheap from somewhere, the state add a tax to encourage local production. Is this somehow not enough to stop people from buying books cheap and sell them expensively in the US? Isn't the solution then to just increase the tax? Are there a reason why copyright can do a better job at this, and are there a substantial difference between copyright regulation and tariffs?
The US government doesn't want textbooks to be more expensive in the US so a tariff makes no sense. This is corporations wanting their goods to be more expensive where people have more money, which they can legally do. Tariffs are unrelated.
Tariffs purpose is to allow corporations to have higher prices locally. Both tariffs and copyright regulations are laws created by the government, and both increase how expensive a item is in the country. How are they unrelated?
How exactly do you make local prices decrease by making imported goods more expensive? It does not make any sense. If the global market price of a product get artificial higher, one do not lower the local prices. The local prices get increased to match what ever the effective global market price (price + tariff) is.
Of course. The purpose of tariffs is neither to increase nor lower the prices of goods. The purpose of tariffs from the government point of view is to increase self-production, value generating, and self-sustainability. But the practical effect of an tariff is a higher priced product for the consumer. In the word of wikipedia: Typical analyses find that tariffs tend to benefit domestic producers and government at the expense of consumers.
If you want to stop people from buying TV's cheap from somewhere, the state add a tax to encourage local production. Is this somehow not enough to stop people from buying books cheap and sell them expensively in the US? Isn't the solution then to just increase the tax? Are there a reason why copyright can do a better job at this, and are there a substantial difference between copyright regulation and tariffs?