On the flip side, anyone who has personally imported new Sterns to bypass the domestic monopoly would be wise not to enter any details of that machine into a publicly accessible database or they might find that their overseas supplier has suddenly and mysteriously been removed as a Stern distributor!
I would suggest that Sterns efforts to prevent certain sellers from moving product to Australia is bordering on illegal, maybe not in the USA (I have no idea about their laws) but I would bet it is in Australia.
It could be argued that it is a form of price fixing and that brings very hefty corporate and individual fines - I would tread very carefully if I was Stern.
Stern might suggest they are only doing it as certain machines are not suitable for this market - that could be disproved in five minutes by sticking a 50/60 cycles mod board in a machine and playing it.
It is not smart these days to try these types of "tricks" to maintain a monopoly.
True, but the rub lies in the limitations of the legislation itself, the powers of the ACCC and obtaining a successful conviction. We all know in reality these kind of under the table "gentleman's agreement" style shenanigans go on everyday across a broad range of industries (take a look at the supermarket duopoly we have here in Australia as a perfect example).
Many companies would counter argue that suppliers and markets can change regularly in such an industry and that this is just part and parcel of a regular course of business conduct, not an intentional attempt to substantially lessen competition.
Not saying they are intentionally and directly preventing supply to Australia (I touched on this in a post a few weeks ago here when the High Court quashed an attempt by LAI to prevent this same thing happening back in the late '80s), but as I implied (and spiroagnew showed) there are alternative more subtle ways a company could undertake to exert indirect influence on a distributor to convince them that shipping NIB machines from time to time to a collector in an external market may not be in their best interests.
One of the fundamental truisms of law is that it isn't what you know, it is what you can prove.
