Should prices change depending on user location?

So I was reading this thread on Hacker News about the popcorn project, which the discussion was mostly about kickstarter backed projects and piracy. I was having this idea about this post on piracy for some time so I thought it’s the high time to post this. Although the basic idea of this post can be used for any service/software that’s out there for a price.

Well Sri Lanka can very well be one of the countries with highest rate of pirated content. Almost all the Windows PCs in the country run a pirated copy of Windows, movies, songs everything is pirated from the web copied and burnt on thousands of CDs and sold at a fraction of the original price. The piracy is so high in the country some local artists have stopped releasing albums and are making a living by releasing singles and doing concerts.

The reason for piracy is not that people want it for free (well some people might want everything for free) but because it’s damn too expensive for an average user to afford. The price of the original Windows 8 professional CD is RS 22500 nearly $200. This is more than the monthly income of many citizens in the country and a pirated copy of Windows 8 can be found out there for RS 100 nearly $0.75.

Same applies for online streaming services, and movies. In Amazon instant video it’ll cost me $17.99 for Hunger Games catching fire which would be nearly RS 2500. Which as a college student something I can’t afford to pay for a single movie. Where I can download it for free by torrent with no one to catch me, and my data plan will allow me to download nearly 10 movies in high quality for $5, even after that I still can download at somewhat higher price for my data.

However I think there are people who will pay for a high quality movie, or genuine Windows OS if the price is affordable. If you look online the price will be same whether you are from USA or Sri Lanka. For a US citizen $17 is not a big deal, however because of bad economy or inflation or whatever reason a dollar is 130 rupees. Which makes a $17 a huge price to afford.

So why not charge $17 from a US citizen and charge an affordable price from other countries in the world where $17 is something that most people can’t afford. And because people can’t afford these prices they’ll inevitably move for piracy.

Yes it might not be profitable, but still would you settle for people using few million pirated copies or selling the same million copies for an affordable price? This can be said for anything, hosting, domains, dropbox, google drive almost all these services are hardly able to afford for an average citizen in the country, or someone who’s a student and doesn’t make a living yet.

So if you are running a service or selling a software will you change your price plans according to territory? What do you think about the idea? or are services doing that already?