Tal Kra-Oz (Hebrew University of Jerusalem – Faculty of Law) has posted Geoblocking and the Legality of Circumvention on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Geoblocking – the limiting of access to digital content based on the user’s geographical location – is one of the most prevalent contemporary iterations of Digital Rights Management (DRM). It presumably operates under the logic that for reasons legal (intellectual property rights ownership), economic (an attempt to maximize profit by licensing content separately to different regions) or both, it is better to limit access to content by region. This paper examines the uses and consequences of geoblocking in order to determine whether or not the legal and economic justifications hold water. Space is also devoted to region-coded DVDs, which operated under a similar logic and are by now virtually extinct, due in large part to technological circumvention of the system. Similarly, geoblocking has spawned a cottage industry designed to bypass it, and may actually encourage piracy of content available freely in other parts of the world.