Copyright and Region-Blocking

I know I know, I am not adding any content with this post but heh, I felt it appropriate to give kudos to Jenny.

Region blocking on DVD's and such is one of those incredibly annoying practices wrought by the monopoly of the Movie Industry (TM) and their desire to control world trade and affairs, despite the fact that world trade and affairs have changed drastically.
The idea of region blocking was instituted to keep films that are generally released earlier in the U.S. from filtering across the pond to Europe earlier than the mandated release date. It also allow the movie executives to effectively fix prices by not letting manufacturers compete on a global scale.
Of course, the big, profit motivated (read "greedy") execs will tell you that their efforts are to control piracy (which is a broken argument in my opinion, but that's a whole other post) but the reality is they are stifling choice and international cooperation in the name of the almighty buck. Fortunatley, supply channels are changing in ways that huge corps are going to be unable to respond to. Just look at what Napster has done to the recording industry. The Internet is going to fundamentally change distribution and pretty soon (hopefully within my lifetime) things like region encoding will be something that we just laugh about. These guys need to wake up and realize that the world is no longer going to be able to be split into easily definable regions based on simple factors like geography.

I run into this problem quite frequently. My partner is British. I spend lots of time in the UK. We happen to quite enjoy quite a bit of British television, which isn't readily available in the US.

Usually, what we do is go to the Virgin Megastore in London (or HMV or what have you), buy a videotape for about $20. Then we take it back to the US, take it to a conversion store (though we should have paid the $800 for a multi-format VCR by now), convert it from PAL to NTSC, and watch it at home. There's some signal degradation, sometimes the copy protection hits us, it's pretty hit-or-miss.

I was hoping that DVDs would solve much of this. Buy a DVD with four times the amount of content (a full season rather than just 2 or 3 episodes), bring it home to the US, play it. We'd gladly pay for a Region 1 version, but they're not available. So we're out of luck. You can't (legally, I think) buy an NTSC-output Region 2 DVD player.

I'd gladly pay for a Region 1 version of such a disk (particularly since you only have to basically change the bits at the beginning of the DVD), but we can't. It's a crappy situation.

Actually, darkewolfe, I'm jennv, short for Jenn Vesperman. Advogato doesn't currently have a Jenny.

But thank you for the kudos. Much appreciated.

Jenn V.

.. and then I typo. Sorry darkewolf.

Jenn V.

You are right of course (it being your nick jennv). My only excuse is that i was tired and the font on the machine at home kinda makes V's look like Y's :) no harm meant :)

Is available in here.

Lets hope this goes out of fashion in a hurry

cya, Andrew...

I don't know about the US, but in Sweden, it is very easy to get a region-free player that can play Region 1 (NTSC) discs on a PAL TV. Even better, though, is to get a TV set that supports both NTSC and PAL. The one I own supports NTSC, PAL, as well as more obscure semi- standards like PAL-60 (which is what my Toshiba DVD player gives when playing Region 1 movies... Yes, it is a mixture between PAL and NTSC, and no, I don't know why it doesn't give a clean signal... :)

Anyway, I fully agree that region locking pretty much sucks. MPAA really needs to wake up and face the reality; They can not control the market any longer. Releasing movies at different times in different continents is just plain silly. It's bad enough that they hit the cinemas at different times. I mean, I had to wait several months more to see Star Wars Episode 1 than you American fellows. How cool is that? (The fact that the movie was not that good doesn't really make it better. ;)

Oh, welll...

Yes, I've heard of them. You can get them here in the US, and they're not that much more expensive than the region-limited variety. There's a catch: the MPAA knows about them.

Apparently, some of the big houses have started releasing movies which have some code at the beginning (I don't know enough about the DVD standard to know how they're getting away with this, BTW) which checks to see if the DVD player will handle multiple regions, and will refuse to play the movie. The Patriot is supposed to be released under this format, according to some people who got advance copies of the Region 1 DVD.

But what this whole thing got me started on was just buying a Region 1 DVD player, AND a Region 2 DVD player. I've seen a lot of Region 2 DVD players which claim that they output in PAL or NTSC (getting a PAL TV here in the US is outrageously expensive, they're grey market, and they usually have bad image quality). Does anyone from Europe have experience with this that they can help me with?

Everytime I read about these industry games, I put off buying a DVD player for another year. But one thing I've been wondering: Is a PC equipped with a DVD drive capable of playing any DVD?

I can confirm that I have a region-selector program for my Panasonic LF-D101 DVD-RAM/DVD-ROM device. My computer hardware isn't powerful enough to actually play a movie with it, so I can't tell whether or not it actually works, but I have no reason to think it doesn't. I suspect that other DVD-ROM devices may come with similar software.

What's very interesting from a legal persepctive is: What happens if a country in one zoen enters into a free trade agreement with a country in another? At the moment, it seems to me that most free trade organizations don't cross DVD zone boundaries (the possible exception being NAFTA/Mexico, but it seems NAFTA isn't all that free anyway). However, this might soon happen, since, as far as I know, western Europe is a different zone from eastern Europe, and the European Union is expanding eastwards. Since the European Union is all about free flow of workers, goods and capital, couldn't a scheme like the DVD zone system be considered an obstacle to free trade, protectionistic, and thus illegal?

Even given my doubts about global free trade being all good, fuzzy-warm and wholesome, it seems this might at least be a positive side effect: Killing the movie industry's stranglehold on the terms of distributing intellectual property.

Hmmm. That's interesting - it's very definately based on forcing the consumer to adhere to the contract between the distributor and the copyright holder.

Thank you for that, Andrew.

Now, if anyone here happens to have any say in region-blocking, publishing, the games industry, or copyright in general - and it's possible someone does - *PLEASE* feel free to take my argument and run with it, as far as it goes!

Jenn V.

What's very interesting from a legal persepctive is: What happens if a country in one zoen enters into a free trade agreement with a country in another? At the moment, it seems to me that most free trade organizations don't cross DVD zone boundaries (the possible exception being NAFTA/Mexico, but it seems NAFTA isn't all that free anyway). However, this might soon happen, since, as far as I know, western Europe is a different zone from eastern Europe, and the European Union is expanding eastwards. Since the European Union is all about free flow of workers, goods and capital, couldn't a scheme like the DVD zone system be considered an obstacle to free trade, protectionistic, and thus illegal?