Is it legal to buy from US store out-of-country if I'm a US citizen?

Question

Hi,
I know variations of this question have been asked already, but I couldn't find this specific one - sorry if it's there and I missed it. I'm a US citizen w/US residence, US credit card, US iTunes account, etc. I'm working overseas in Laos, where there is no iTunes store. iTunes allows me to purchase songs from the US store w/my account. But, I just re-read the terms of service and I have to affirm that I'm in the US in order to use the store. So, am I okay using the store anyway, since what I wrote in the second sentence is true? Or is that violating the terms of service or breaking some law I don't know about? No other options here - no Lao store and no Lao credit card anyway if there were!

Answer 1

From This Business of Music (10th Edition) (by M. William Krasilovsky and Sydney Shemel) (and thanks to the Mimico Kid for the reference) :
The difficulty of establishing workable business models for digital files (...) extends to where they are sold and where they are played. This is the issue of territoriality, and it is an illustration of how the Internet makes it necessary to reexamine basic assumptions that have been taken for granted (...).
(....) In the music business the primary problem is that copyrights are national and therefore specific rights are tied to national laws and the interpretations of national courts.
(.... T)hough we can one day hope to see the development of common standards with respect to copyright, the fact that the music business is building upon a history of nation-specific contractual relationships means that the goal of universal international standards is not, for the forseeable future, a practical one.
(...) Adding to the difficulty (...) the copyrights themselves may have been assigned to different companies in different territories. The best hope for a cleaner start and a simpler future is worldwide recognition that digital uses are in fact - and should be in law - totally new.
The content owners don't like cross-border sales of CDs either, but there's nothing they can do to stop such sales. They can, though, and do stop cross-border download sales, since if the download stores refuse, the rights holders won't license the tracks to that store.
So unless and until the record companies, et. al, all get together and agree to allow download stores to sell cross-border, there's absolutely nothing Apple or any other download store can do.