Are you really sure you own your downloads?

Like region coding for DVD and Blu-ray it's hard to see what can be gained from controlling what peple can read in which territory of the world. Discourage people interested in buying legitimate copies and then moan about sales lost through piracy? Support your local second-hand book shop before they're all gone!

Yeah, the whole "Digital Rights Management" scene is complex and frustrating. It used to enrage me when I bought a DVD and was forced to endure lectures on not stealing music or whatever before I could watch the movie I have legitimately paid for. I would think "if I had just torrented this, I wouldn't be having sit through this clip basically accusing me of being a potential thief". Which is ironic.

We have region-free DVD player to get around that regional coding thing. As I am now in North America, the regional coding on Blu-ray doesn't affect us much. I feel for those in Australia, though.

Wasn't the original idea of DVD Region Encoding to keep DVD releases in sync with cinema releases around the world?

Like most restrictive practices, I think the real agenda was to keep prices higher in some regions than others.