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Time Warner To Change DVD Region Coding System?
cyber-vandal writes: "I've been playing with livid for a few months now, and someone posted a rather disturbing message on the mailing list. Apparently Time Warner are making changes to the region encoding system to stop multi-region dvd players working properly. The link can be found here. I'm hoping it's just the MPAA putting out FUD to discourage people from buying them, can anyone confirm or deny this?" I've tried reaching Time-Warner, and haven't gotten a reply - anyone else heard anything?
Or just be made here for personal use (or, in the case of software, distribution by means of such things as Freenet) by people who don't give a f*ck about the DMCA.
I asked:
What is the equivalent method for imparting a degree of community spirit and social responsibility to the studios?
Nobody replied to that at all. It should be pretty obvious that what applies to a pest in the neighbourhood doesn't apply to a multinational -- the power balance is utterly different.
But the question remains. How do you impart a degree of community spirit and social responsibility to the studios?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
The goodwill of those folks? We're talking about someone who while on a trip in say the US found a copy of a movie on the shelf for significantly cheaper than there country. Or maybe one they aren't even able to buy there. Why is it piracy to then buy that film anywhere but in your home country? Is it pirarcy to go to France, buy a movie, and then return home?
I really doubt that all Region 1 DVDs are available in all 6 regions.
treke
Is this new? I seem to remember reading on /. last winter about new discs (Matrix?) which were programmed to challenge the DVD player like this:
Whereas, "compliant" players would pass:
In other words, a false challenge would be issued first. Fully region free players would fail this every time, while the "approved" players would work fine.
Surely the stockholders support the actions of the studios, since they lead to greater profits? I don't see how one could convince them of the merits of social responsibility, since they're in it for the money.
Anyway, stockholders only vote by buying or selling stock. Selling doesn't convey a message that is specific enough, ie. it won't tell the studios that regional coding is wrong.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Hee, hee! Nothing ever is going to make DVDs hard
to get in the US (the rest of America is a different issue). The US is the Big Consumer
Market.
Region coding provides nothing more than the
ability to _restrict_ who gets what and when. It's
a restrictive technology, and if it gets bypassed,
it bypasses arbitrary (or more specifically,
marketing-based) restrictions.
There's NOTHING (nothing, nothing, nothing!!!) in
region codes that helps the consumer, or anyone
at all except for the company's bankroll.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Good thing stuff like this never gets taken out of context or misinterpreted or anything. Otherwise people might try to marginalize our points of view on issues like this by painting us as knee-jerk extremists with immature worldviews.
That would be bad. Good thing it never happens.
-
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
With the Apex dvd player you can either turn off the region code or change it. I have a DVD movie that is about 1 year old and it would not play with region codes off, so i just switched it :-)
An old web page of mine http://www.10-10-info.com/apex/
I like to build things and wire stuff together.
Just buy any home cinema magazine, and you'll find the adverts full of region-free players.
It's only the major brand-tied houses that don't sell them, precisely because they are brand-tied and therefore not free agents. Wherever the free market is allowed to operate, region-free players abound.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Then, one day, I decided to buy Dino Crisis (the American version, no less). I stuck the disk in my PSX, and I got some Japanese text, which I assume said, "How dare you try to play our disk in your region free player, stupid consumer-drone!" inside a "not" sign (a circle with a slash through it, like the Ghostbusters symbol or a No Smoking sign.)
At that point I mostly stopped buying PS games, and I'm only planning on buying one more (Lunar: Eternal Blue it has sentimental value from my SegaCD days, and my /. user ID was taken from it). I'll also never buy any more Sony products, or any encrypted DVDs, period.
My advice to everyone in my family was to just not buy a DVD player. (I will certainly never own such a thing myself, under any concievable circumstances.) They completely ignored me and dismissed me as a crackpot (which is what they do with most of my crusades) and bought a DVD player anyway. They conceeded many of my points, but they figure that if legal DVD stuff becomes a problem, they'll be able to find illegal DVD stuff on the black market. (Amazingly enough they are probably right, I know three people who can get black market goods myself, mostly from them bragging about it.)
I think the best way to avoid falling into the trap of giving money to Sony, AOL/Time/Warner, and the rest of the MPAA/RIAA racketeers is to not buy their players. If I had known when I bought my Playstation what I know now about Sony, I would never have bought their game console in the first place, and wouldn't have so many PSX games. (Darn it, I've always been one of these fools who legally purchases copies of games! If I were crooked, I could have just got my friend to sell me cheap CD-R versions. I guess the old saying is true, "Never give a sucker an even break!" But then I'm still living in a dream world where game designers are decent guys like Mark Blank or Dan Bunten, not evil multinationals like Sony.)
Boycott's don't work, or at least I'd like to know one case where a boycott has actually worked against a multinational (the ones from the Christian Right don't count, they succeed sometimes because of intimidation and scare tactics, not purely because the member of the AFA aren't going to buy a product. i.e. Take the show off or the FCC will get you, etc..) But at least if I opt out of a corrupt system, I don't have to feel like I'm getting screwed over. Incidentally, in an interview in a new issue of PC Gamer, a game designer sounded pretty upset about a deal he made with Sony. He basically ended by saying, "But it's Sony, what can you do, expect bend over and like it." That sentiment can pretty much be aimed at all multinationals, like AOL/Time/Warner. However, they still haven't enacted laws to force us to buy their infernal gadgets, so we can still decide not to live under their laws.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Well, I guess most people not living in zone 1 do. I mean, why wait for a year extra to get the movie when you can get the same movie, sans the subtitles right away?! Oh, and many zone 1 residents import movies from other zones. Think Hong Kong action, Manga, etc.
Some "innocent bystanders" are likely to get burned.
Simple answer. Go buy PLENTY of discs. Next day, return them all saying you got some sort of wierd problem when you tried to play them. Make the process as time consuming as possable for the video place ('forget' your reciept etc). Make sure it's a place that allows returns rather than store credit. Be sure to try several new copies of the disks (several in one day if time permits) and refuse to give up. Be sure to point out that plays just fine, so it can't be the player. With persistance, they might even pay you to go away!
Make sure that the discs you do that for are actually using the new coding method, ideally with an actual region free player.
It's called civil disobediance, huh?
:-(
If we all followed the law because not following it is always wrong, we'd still be part of Great Britain.
Laws that are bad for society at large, IMO, should be broken. The hard part is finding people with enough courage to do it.
P.S. I think I just got trolled
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
first one to go has to be Case! Who's with me?
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Currency conversions are automatic when buying on a credit or debit card.
That's why dozens of thousands of Brits are buying DVDs over the Internet from places outside of their native Region 2 (mainly the US) without having to think at all about the currency. I bet VISA are making a killing on the conversions, but good luck to them -- they're facilitating our freedom.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
A variation on your idea:
Go to your local MegaHollyBuster and rent one of these Time Warner disks. Bring it back and bitch up a storm about it not playing; play dumb; demand a free rental. Grab another T/W disk. Come back in screaming bloody murder about their shitty disks until you get an answer that you "understand". Yell and rant some more, almost to the point of being kicked out of the store.
I guarantee it won't take very many of these episodes before they dump this dumb idea.
Before you go saying you can change your region, realize that most players that allow this only allow you to do it a *limited* number of times. The way this is supposed to work is that you, the consumer, are only allowed to change the region of a DVD player five (5) times on your own. If you need to change the region again, you have to send your DVD drive back to the manufacturer to have this count reset. They only can reset the counter five times as well. This gives you a grand total of 25 times you are allowed to change the region of any given DVD player.
Many manufacturers simply don't tell the public how to change their region code. These allow 25 region changes using whatever key sequence/method is required to do it, since it is assumed that only the manufacturer knows the sequence.
So before you go saying you can just change your player's region, relize that most of us can't keep switching our players from region to region. Many of us are not technically literate enough to do the work required to bypass a counter. Future designs likely will not let you bypass these counters, and do encryption & Macrovision(tm) on the same chip.
My concern with region codes is for works that are not released in a particular region. I already import Music CDs from other countries I can not get in my own. If DVD-Audio discs have the region code system that DVDs presently have, I will need to have a player for *each region* I import music from, as well as my own.
Sorry. While you many not inconvinience 99% of your purchasers, there are the 1% of us that are MAJORLY inconvienced by region codes.
That was a pretty lame comment ... most countrys' money will work in most other countries. You just need a big company that likes different kinds of money (ooh, a bank ;-).
... we just don't give as good of an exchange rate as they could get back home. :-)
I'm Canadian, and we accept Canadian and American money everywhere
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
"You're welcome to try and find a legal DVD player without region coding and Macrovision protection." was his last comment before I left the store.
The problem is, you sounded too knowledgable. Act like you don't know much about DVD. "This friend of mine said that some DVD players won't take Japanese discs. This one isn't like that is it?" (Bonus points for a wide eyed I ain't never seen no city before bumpkin impresion). Make it clear that as far as you're concerned any player like that is just shoddy merchandise and they should be ashamed of themselves for selling such junk.
Whenever I look at the situation today, I think of Omni Consumer Products in the movie Robocop. To quote Clarence Bodakker when he was trying to stop Robocop from beating him to death, "I work for Dick Jones. Dick Jones is OCP. OCP runs the cops, you're a cop."
The cops basically do work for OCP nowadays, and not for the people. They aren't protecting or serving anyone but their corporate masters in matters like these. Every year, the corruption destroying the United States government spreads like a cancer, but the people remain complacent.
Plenty of other countries have complacent populations in the face of government corruption, in fact many countries are far more opressed by their governments than United States citizens are. But the massive corruption in the US government is dangerous because the US is a powerful country with a large standing army. If the US is a defacto "world's policeman," feeling that it has the right to use its troops whenever it feels it is morally justifiable, what can the rest of that world do if that policeman is corrupt?
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
No it isn't. Companies have differnt price levels for different market segments all the time. Look at CPUs. Intel and AMD have one price list for top level purchasers (your Compaqs and IBMs and such), another for integrators and another for their channel distributors.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Federal laws are called Federal Statues.
Yes, I inspected quite a few of those Federal Statues when I was down in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. Almost all of them had clothes on, but they did look quite a bit more heroic than the live politicians walking by.
Why is it piracy to then buy that film anywhere but in your home country? Is it pirarcy to go to France, buy a movie, and then return home?
speaking of which, I did exactly that this summer. I now own a pristine copy of cyrano de bergerac (wonderful movie, not avalible in anything but region 2, and horrible in any translation) which I cannot watch. I did know this before I went, but I knew I'd regret it forever if I didn't get it. so now what? rip to VCD? never watch it? them's my options. the whole region-coding thing is a real problem for anyone who isn't even trying to "pirate" (by their definition) but simply is bilingual and enjoys movies from multiple countries.
Lea
There are singles. They are wildly popular in Japan, and I have a good amount of them. Next non-sense, please.
(8-DCS)
As much as people in general may be bad with technology, they also hate things flashing at them. That's why ns's <blink> tag was so maligned.
Care about freedom?
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Wouldn't that only apply to sales within the U.S.? Our laws don't apply to markets that aren't 'ours'.
So, a company can't have artificial pricing zones within the U.S., but if the company prices things different for Japan than for Germany than for U.S., that isn't our problem.
Plus, it gets even more complicated when you consider import/export tariffs, certifications (e.g. CE), and trade agreements requiring min/max import/export levels on certain products.
More basically, as others have said, it's to protect the investment in the product. This is to prevent, say, an american film from being sold in the European market until it has been suitably modified (dubbed, re-edited for local decency laws, import regs, etc.)
Is this a good thing? I don't know. But I can see why it's done and why US anti-trust laws aren't wholly relevant.
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
the 'civil' in civil disobedience rules out the criminal options.
I can imagine a smartass DVD player talks to a not-that-stupid-either disc:
:) The dvd player just wanted to see that anime piece, you know :)
Player: Yo, man, show me what you've got in there...
Disc: Dude, you look pretty ugly.. You look like... like... like you are from Japan or something
Player (quickly taking off samurai disguise): What ? What is that jyapen anyway ? How do you spell that ?
Disc: Hold on right there ! I've seen you taking that japanese thing off ! I know you...
Player (hiding his little penguin statue): You better play that movie, bro..
Disc: No movie for you, you pirate-hacker-linux-based-penguin-powered-bastard ! I'm not even talking to you anymore !
Message on the screen: "Disc was rejected due to a region conflict. Talk to your local distributor."
P.S. No offence against Japan
--
--
On scale from -14 to 56 this post is '-15, Nonexistent'
As a zone 1 resident (Florida, USA), I can say that all of my friends who have any interest in movies have bought regionless DVD players. Mostly Pioneer models.
Most people want to view Anime, however there are significant European releases that never make it over here on DVD, like Lexx (available in Germany, but not in the US), which many drives many people nuts (both fans of Lexx, and fans of Tim Curry/Barry Bostwick/Rocky Horror).
This is likely to continue. The "correct" ending of Armies of Darkness, and Disney's "Black Cauldron" were just recently were released in the US, but have been available in Europe. I believe (ianame) that Disney's "Song of the South" is still only available in Europe.
BTW - Manga are comic books - I like Battle Angel, 2001, A,A', and anything by Masume Shirow, while my girlfriend likes Secret Plot, Bondage Fairies, and anything Hentai. Unlikely that you'll read any of it in a DVD player. Not to be confused with the company that puts out Anime whose name is "Manga Video".
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Persoanlly I would love to see a good list of movies that are effected by this that create a problem for me in the USA that I could understand without any interpreter.
Many U.S. citizens consider English a second language and *GASP* sometimes like to watch movies in their native language. Others have become fluent in another language and want to maintain their language skills. Still others Are into fan subbing and wouldn't mind reading the translation off of a sheet of paper or playing an audio recording alongside the video they legitimatly own.
I wonder how the MPAA would like it if labor and resources were 'region coded' so that discs sold in the U.K. had to be made in a U.K. factory out of raw materials from the U.K. Same for other countries. I'll bet they would be awefully upset at the mere suggestion of that! No more buy stuff (including labor) where it's cheap and sell the product where it's expensive.
What bugs the hell out of me is that different countries get different quality of DVD for the same movie. When Starship Troopers came out as I recall the Region 1 US disc was fantastic with a bunch of extra features. The Region 2 EUROPE disc (Germany etc) had less features but still atleast had the trailers etc and the Region 2 UK disc had the film on a flipper and that was it.
I just bought a top notch sound system because DVD gives you the best sound quality I figure, may as well take advantage. But do you region 1'ers know that in the UK we have *TWO* DTS dvd's and that's it? We're getting our first film RSN, Gladiator. But I look on the web at places like dvdexpress and Region 1 has a huge number of DTS movies.
What about releases that never make it? One of my favourite movies last year was Antz. I personally thought it was better then Bugs Life because the story line was much more 'adult oriented' than 'kid oriented', meaning they could get a bit deeper, some more subtle jokes etc. Bugs Life made it out in the UK but Antz has not to this day been released over here.
I can deal with the time delay, it annoys the hell out of me but I've dealt with it all my life so i'm not gonna use that as another argument.
So if I restrict myself to Region 2 then I get screwed on features, screwed on sound tracks and don't get the movies that I want to have in my collection. Uhhhhh Sorry, what's up with that? What era are we living in again?
If there's a good movie I want then if there is a DTS version I buy it Region 1, if it isn't available over here I buy it Region 1 but if it is over here and high quality then I prefer to support Region 2 - but they bloody well make it hard and this is just going to make it harder. Time to check with the people I got the player from to see whether the mod will be affected by this.
I can see DVD getting strangled by the manufacturers at this rate. One day they'll realise... The only way to prevent piracy, or to prevent use in a form other than you would like, is to NOT RELEASE IT AT ALL. We're all free thinking people after all, we all come up with ideas - especially the Slashdot community.
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This technique is old-hat already in use on some MGM Universal discs such as the world is not enough. Basically the DVD specification allows you to branch to a different section based on the players region code. The original hacks were called "Code-Free", "Region 0" or "Legs-Up". These hacks basically ignored the region code at the start of the disc then just played it. The problem with this is that they could then region-branch all regions that should not be able to play the disc to a specific screen. The MGM disc I mentioned displays an MGM message saying the disc is not compatible rather than the DVD players own "Invalid disc" message. This is not something new and will not affect those players that allow region-selection such has been the case on most players for a while. I brought my Panasonic A350 over 2 years ago and it has such a modification. Those people using RemoteSelector with the Creative kit will also be able to continue watching.
[)amien
United States dollars work only in the United States. You could say that they're "region coded" too.
Actually they work in Argentina, Guatemala, and possibly a few other South American countries.
:wq
Not ours.
And the studios oughta know better than pass the problem onto the customers?
What? Thinner bottom line?
Though shit.
--
Americans are bred for stupidity.
Uhmmm, yeah, sorry. I knew that bit about Manga/Anime, I'm just too darn tired... Yup, many movies are more complete in their non-US versions (just like Debian is... :^) ), mostly when it comes to censoring of explicit sexuality, violence etc. At least in Sweden, almost no movies get censored at all (for some stupid reason, however, they cut a little from American Pie; it's the same version as the US version. The original version is, if I'm not all wrong, almost 5 minutes longer.) If they get cut, it's to shorten them. And IF any censorship is performed, you can still go to "Svenska Censurnämnden" (Swedish institute of Censorship) and demand to see every bleeding second they cut away.
I must admit to have seen some Telesync's/Screeners etc. now and then, and when I then see the movie at the cinema, I often get surprised when I notice scenes that has been cut away in the US versions, often for no apparent reason, except out of fear of sexual content, perhaps...
Mmmm, and of course, some of the best movies are made in Europe anyway, such as Lukas Moodyson's movies "Fucking Åmål" (US title "Show Me Love") and "Tillsammans" (no US title yet; still running on Swedish cinemas), Krzysztof Kieslowski (everything he's made, basically), all the movies based on Astrid Lindgren's books, the Danish Dogma movies, British comedy etc.
Actually, you'll be OK. This latest Warner madness is only targetted at customers trying to watch Region 1 (US) DVDs outside of Region 1. After all, it wouldn't do to annoy the US home market would it. But those dirty furriners can go hang.
... business as usual.
Typical US Imperialism
Regards, Ralph.
Of course I'll be screwed if they say yes as I'm flat out buying lunch most days. It's probably not a good thing to send these stores a message "The people who want region free DVD are broke and never buy anything."
So look up the latest Sony, Phillips web page and at the last minute pretend you're waiting for the new model with the Elecro-Magnetic Polarization Enhancing Dongle.
:wq
Or if your player has been modified in the manner that mine has. I don't have a region-free dvd player, my player requires me to switch the region that the player will be at the moment, so it can be a region 3 or a region 1 but never both a region 3 and a region 1.
I'm assuming this won't affect me, or my habit of buying DVDs from regions other than my specified ones. I'd actually be rather shocked if it did.
"Don't trolls get tired?"
2. If so, they'll have to go after a lot of DVD manufacturers, including Sony, Hitachi, Panasonic, for leaving secret codes to unlock their players.
3. I don't believe a court would allow DMCA to sanction price fixing, in this case.
(if you want me to be obedient and don't temper with region locks, first sell your friggin discs at the same price worldwide)
4. DVDCCA's strongest arguments for the DeCSS case surround piracy, not DCMA violation. Region coding has absolutely nothing to do with piracy (yes, some pirates use DeCSS, admit it), and they know that.
5. Finally, to have it protected, there has to be an international law because region coding is by definition an international thing - only enforcing it in the US is a waste of effort.
Fortunately, DMCA is not international (yet).
an Apex. It allows you to turn the region feature on and off. So if this is true, alls I have to do is turn the region thingy back on.
:)
And thanks Slashdot, since this is the place where I heard about the apex
> Note: The Latin-derived word meaning "to work around" is "circumvent."
No, "circumvent" means "blow wind around". Which is exactly what our response to access control systems should be.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
But DMCA only covers devices that allow copying. Watching a region-encoded DVD on a region-free player doesn't allow copying. (macrovision-free does and might be covered under DMCA)
--
They make all the discs for different regions in Taiwan or where ever they can get cheap labor. The problem they have is that they have a hard time with factories operating at night or producing an "overrun" with the production line. So then, all those region 1 movies that they don't want played in China won't play on their "legal" region 6 player.
This is probably why the MPAA is so cranky about DECSS. Because now it is possible to change the region now on the DVDs and then cut different discs (in a hidden factory somewhere) and stamp out millions of copies.
I really do not think pirating is a problem in the US of video anymore (it is in China). Traditional channels of copyright protection exist with legal remedies to take care of unauthorized copying. The MPAA is shaking in their boots over a video "napster" however, and once you watch a movie, you tend not to watch it again unlike listening to music. What they need to do is add extra value to the DVDs - like maybe a complete soundtrack with the DVD, a copy of the screenplay, history of the writing of the screenplay etc. etc.
But these same channels do not exist in other countries, and there is little if any debate there whether it is "moral" or not. It's "just done".
The sad thing is that the MPAA has to buy off congress (done) and knife the constitution (getting ready to turn the knife) to protect their profit in other countries not even pertaining to the US.
However I say this with a caveat. If the price of DVDs climb like that what has been happening with CDs, then it suddenly becomes "economical" to pirate. This raises a whole other issue as to why CDs are so expensive and the price never drops. There obviously is no market pressure on the few big players (aka price fixing?), and as the judge in the Napster case astutely noted "why isn't there any singles like 45s in the old days?" (because it costs the same to do a single !!!)
Another thought, if the term of copyright was lowered to a term of twenty years (like patents), then there would be an inspiration to create more, better and cheaper movies. huh??
So it is really about achieving control and greed. Not that I think that people should "steal" music and video, but that it is more of a symptom. If traditional market pressures existed in the recorded movie/music business (as it obviously doesn't now - antitrust issues are rife here) I doubt if we would even be having these problems now.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Okay I don't know much about DVD playback but this seems technologically impossible.
This new standard is supposed to still work on current one region players right. Isn't all a multi-region player is is a player which can emulate any regions players?
The only way I can imagine them doing something like this is to put this extra warning in a section encoded for the wrong region. That way the multi-region players will play this sopt which will issue the warning and somehow stop the playing of the rest of the DVD.
This of course will last about 10 minutes before the multi-region players merely become region selectable players.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
US Dollars work damn near anywhere on earth. The US $100 is just about all that anyone will accept as a truly reliable currency in many places...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
All laws are valid as well as just
If that were the case then why would the American Constitution have ammendments? Not all laws are just or valid. That is why we have a correctable system of government. Facism was law in Nazi Germany, did that mean that everyone had to help round up the Jews simply because it was the law? Please. Read Civil Disobedience or http://members.tripod.com/Chet22/disobedience.htm
This still doesn't mean I can watch cyrano, which is, as I see it, a problem.
and this also doesn't mean that I won't be moving back to europe at some point, at least for a few years... of course, I never once saw a dvd player that wouldn't play region 1 dvds (except for in the Sony store), and racks of region 1 dvds are all over the place. I just hope the EU would sue to get this breach of trade law cleared up!
fat chance, eh?
Lea
Basically, a DVD player has not one, but two places that contain the region code. One is a bitmap with one bit per region, stored in the MPEG stream. Normally, a player will only play a disc with a specific bit set in the region code bitmap, and a disc will have one or more regions set.
Note that there are eight bits, but only six regions. The other two are reserved for future use. In fact, I think one of them is intended for use in special situations, like in-flight movies on airplanes. I have found disks advertised as "all region", which would not play in regions 7 or 8, and others which would play in all regions 1 thru 8.
The second place is in a register that is readable by the GUI code. (As mentioned in an earlier response, this is register #20.) Because this is an integer, it can contain only one region code at any given time. So the player will have one "native" zone, regardless of how permissive its bitmap is.
There are two types of region mods. One, typically called "region zero", is to simply disable the MPEG region checking. This is like using a crowbar to open a locked door. The second is to make the player truly switch regions so that it becomes a player from another region. This is like having a keyring with all the keys on it. (I suppose there's also a third way, which is to region-zero the bitmap, and make the GUI region switchable for trick disks. Or even better yet, have it check the bitmap and set register #20 automatically. I guess this would be like having a master key. But I haven't heard about people doing this.)
The "region-zero" mod won't change your GUI region, so any "trick" disk from the same region as the "native" region of the player, will always play, as always. However, the mod itself may change the native region of the player from its factory setting, say to zone 1, which is the most useful.
Switching the regions works well, and some players let you do that from secret codes on the remote. But such players may also have a built-in counter so that you can only change regions 5-25 times before it stays locked.
The best are players which have been modded to be infinitely region switchable, and Macrovision disabled. The Pioneer 505, 909, and 606 (from before Pioneer changed their logo) were famous for only requiring two jumper wires be soldered to the MPEG board. Then the CONDITION button in the right menu would switch regions.
There's one more cool thing that can be done with this. There are now discs which check the GUI region and enable/disable features depending on the native region of the player. So you might get Chinese subtitles on a region 3 player, but not a region 1 player. This lets them sell in multiple regions, but they only have to master the disc once, and only keep one item in stock. Ghostbusters II is supposed to be one of these.
There is a similar situation with the Playstation. Most Playstation chips work by blasting the special subcodes over and over into the right input. However, many of the people who installed chips also happened to sell games, and were just as annoyed at piracy as Sony was. So someone came up with the "anti-piracy" chip. This chip watched for the first three bytes of the subcode (SCEA, SCEJ, SCEE), and blasted the last byte of the USA code whenever it saw them. A CD-R wouldn't have the subcodes, and the chip would know it.
Then someone came up with a trick to check for chips by only putting the subcodes where it was necessary to boot the game. It would check parts of the disc that did NOT have the subcodes, and get pissed if it found them. The best part was that anti-piracy chips had no trouble with this scheme, because they didn't send the subcodes when they weren't supposed to. (Sure, someone then came up with the "stealth" chip, which disables itself after running long enough to boot a disc, but that's not as l33t as the way anti-piracy chips work.)
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Joe Public probably buys his DVDs at the same store he bought his player, and has no idea about region coding, content scrambling, DeCSS, or the way the MPAA has starting making up copyright protections.
Big bold letters to the effect of "You can't play this $30 disc in your $200 player, and sorry we didn't tell you sooner" may be just what it takes to make this issue a public concern, rather than just a small underground vs. big business thing.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
you didn't tell us which model
7thzone.com has an extensive selection of 'region-free solutions'.
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Reading between the lines, it looks like what is going on is that the disc exploits the details of the region coding spec to detect if the player will support more than one region. Unless the player rejects the non-region-1 portion of the disc, the region-1 part won't play. The MPAA must be feeling very happy that their original region coding implementation allowed for this.
Now this is easy to bypass. The trick is that you have to have the player figure out what region the disc wants and switch to that region, and that region only. For now, this will require a player that allows you to manually reset the region. For example, with my Raite 715 DVD/MP3 player, I can use a secret menu to set it to region free, or to any specific region. Hence, I can set it to only region 1 for these new DVDs and to region free when I want to play some other region.
Eventually, we can hope someone will put out a player that detects that the majority of the content is flagged for a given region, so it will switch to that region. What would be really cool is a DVD player with open-source firmware. Hey, that's what Livid is!
The flaw here is that the disc is not capable of actually detecting anything. To detect something, some software is going to have to run on the player. That means that the player is in charge, and can do whatever it wants with the software. Namely, the player could be programmed to simply return whatever return code is neccessary for the DVD's software to continue executing, instead of showing the warning on the screen.
This is a really silly move on the part of Warner. It is going to cost them money to do this. It will certainly also cost them goodwill. It will not be effective. Existing DVD players could be modified to work around this. New DVD players can be designed to work around this. Software which runs on general-purpose computers (e.g. livid) can easily be modified to circumvent this.
I imagine that Warner's software is going to try to detect a multi-region player by presenting itself as two different regions and seeing if the player will play both. The solution is simple and obvious: once the player chooses a region for the DVD, lock that region in and always claim to be a player from that region until another disc is inserted. There isn't any writeable memory on a DVD, so it isn't as if the disc itself can store the region code of the player.
Chances are NZ's laws will be "harmonised" with international IP treaties, and regionalised DVD players will become the standard there soon enough. The movie studios' budgets dwarf the NZ Gross National Product by orders of magnitude, so if it came to a trade war, they could afford to embargo New Zealand and put a lot of pressure on the government there.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Presumably this modification is only going to catch player that have been hacked to Region 0 (All Regions)? Most hacks seems to set the player to a specific, non-zero, region with an option to change it on the fly (is this true?) or on command. I don't think the mod will catch these players.
But what do I know...? Comments?
Hi!
Same in Australia.
The players themselves are region-crippled, but the salesman wastes no time in telling you that they offer a professional modification service for a reasonable fee.
This was the case for 2 department stores and 3 hifi stores that I tried. It's almost the first thing out of the salesman's mouth.
And all the local stores have Region-1 displays in addition to their usual Region-4 areas.
Everyone's ignoring the regions. It's costing us money to fix the players, and it's a pain in the arse, but nobody respects it. Especially not the stores or player manufacturers.
Look at the constitution;
Article I section 8 of the constitution states that the purpose of copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors exclusive right to their respective Writings...."
(bold mine)
This is clear. It says that the copyright should go to the author. It does not say that it goes to the author's children, grandchilderen, distant relatives, or corporate interest. When congress originally passed the first extension to the copyright law in 1831 (upon renewal for a total term of 28years) none of the original framers of the constitution were even in the congress to vote on it, and only one (Madison) was alive.
Retroactive changes to the length of a term of copyright are wrong, in my opinion. I would have no problem with Disney lobbying for longer and longer copyright terms .
The problem is that "ex post facto" is Disney's middle name. See here. So it's ok for big money to argue for retroactive changes, but if the public does, then screw them??? The thing is that if the public ever does, they don't have the money "to grease the wheels" to move legislation through. There are no glamerous movie stars, no expensive parties, no expensive lobbyists to take congress out to dinner. That's they way it has been for the last tenty-five years until now you have David Corwin, senior counsel for the Motion Picture Association of America, saying that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is "near and dear to our heart." See here.
The fact of the matter is that anybody who studies this issue even just a little bit realize that the public's interest has aalways been nothing more than an afterthought. Indeed, the author of this analysis noted that with the task force on the DMCA;
The message of these recommendations seems to be that the Task Force will see what rights are left over for the public once the rights of the authors have been firmly established.
And this was before the passage of the Sonny Bonno Copyright Term Extension Act!
So we have reached the point now that the only rights left to take away are constitutional ones, such as freedom of speech, fair use, the right of first sale, and the established right to reverse engineer and have interoperability. So now copyright holders are taking those too!
What really has been "ex post facto" has been the endless retroactive copyright terms over the last 40 years.
with Disney lobbying for longer and longer copyright terms if the longer terms only affected new works
For the first time in our history, nothing is falling into the public domain due to the CTEA. So, as a citizen, why should I support some government granted monopoly if I get nothing in return??? Where is the Quid Pro Quo???? These same companies that are suing Napster are the ones who lobbyied and effectively "paid" congress for the CTEA, not to mention the DMCA. Look at it, what is this story and thread about?? Companies who do not want us to use Napster or DVDs on linux, but at the same time are taking our fundamental rights as citizens away, not to mention the old (and I mean old) works that were supposed to enter the public domain?
So what reason do I have to support their so called "copyright" when they are effectively taking all my "rights" away????
Time for a little counterpoint, don't you think?
If the term length is set by legislation (I am not certain if it is or not), then in what way is this not ex post facto?
If you read the constitution, the "right to copy" was originally intended to go to the author only for limited times. So the only "ex post facto" here is the endless copyright term extensions??
It's so ludicrously bad now, that you have the government arguing that extending copyright is a national tradition This statement (in their brief to the appelant court, see openlaw) is so outrageously absurd that it defies description. So by their reasonong, congress twenty years ago had planned on retroactively extending copyright terms now, and in another twenty years they are going to do it again, ad infinitum???
Why didn't congress back in 1976 just extend copyright law for another 100 years? Or is congress just trying to "circumvent" the "limited times" clause of the constitution???? What's "ex post facto" about saying that is wrong??
So, what congress is doing is whoring themselves to special corporate interests by defrauding the public of their due. There is no nicer way to put it.
Please forgive me if this post seems like a flame. But your statement illustrates perfectly why many of us over at openlaw shake our heads. On the surface it seems very logically and correct, but in reality it could not be further from what is right. I'm really glad you made your post, because it illustrates beautifully the widespread ignorance of how the publics' rights are being ripped off by a prostituted congress. I do not say this lightly.
So I invite you to become familiar with the openlaw site, and I hope to see you on the discussion boards there. Some of the people their are extremely smart, and when I open my mouth I get it slapped!!!
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
They aren't.
It isn't.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
There are two types of region-free players: the not so good ones are set to region 0, making them region-non-specific, so to say. The hack described in the memo tests for such players and has been used by other movie studios (Disney) before. The better ones are region changeable, meaning you can switch the region. For example, if it's a player from the US, it's region 1 by default, but you can switch it to region 2 to watch Japanese DVDs.
Bottom line: most region-hacked players are region changeable, so this is not a problem.
I work for a record store in Australia and our Warner rep sent us a copy of the letter last week which I submitted to slashdot. (Note: the best way to get a story on slashdot is to submit it to ZDNet, Wired, or even DVD Debate.)
I find it interesting that they explicity mention that the CSS licensing agreement requiresa DVD player to be region specific. Everyone except Judge Kaplan knew CSS was primarily an access control mechanism, this announcement demonstrates the importance the MPAA members attatch to it.
:wq
But please note that Henry wasn't arguing that you should ignore the law every time you disagree with it. He advocated refusal to cooperate with the unjust measures of your government. ("Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.") But I don't think he would extend that to violence against people in the government. And I don't think he would consider not being able to watch a DVD under Linux to be a real injustice!
__________
Incidentally, for the sake of those Canadians who complain about our low dollar (when buying American goods), its making our GNP go up because of American foreign purchasing. A lot of smart canadian companies are starting to go online to sell to americans ... great deals on products made in the USA ;-)
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I don't believe that this is anything particularily new. I think other DVD creators have already been doing this.
Region code checking is up to the DVD player. Does the region code of the player match the region code of the disk?
Yes, play the disk
No, don't play the disk
However the DVD standard allows for assembly language like code to be put on the disk. Normally this is used to do the menus and other things. However you can use to further check that the region code reported from the DVD makes sense.
For example:
Mov GPRM0, SPRM20 ; get the region code of the player
NE GPRM0, 1 ; If region code is not exactly ONE
GOTO Failure ; then either this is the wrong player or the user hacked it.
For further info see the July 98 edition of DDJ.
A new VHS tape on a X-head VCR might approach the image quality of a DVD, but only the first or second time you play it- Tapes wear out.
A higher-end home theater system would include 6.1 digital audio decoding, component video, anamorphic widescreen television. Watch a movie on such a setup, and you'll throw away your VHS VCR.
I never purchased movies on tape, but now I have a medium-priced DVD player and many DVD movies, these are the reasons I buy DVDs:
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
This will kill my DVD player. My DVD player, out of the box, never supported region codes. It was one of several flaws in its design, although the features vastly outweigh its flaws (it produces very high quality progressive output and also performs line doubling of all other video sources).
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
and me with no points to moderate you up with ^^;;
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
Regions are there for two reasons:
First, they allow the sale of DVDs in one region (generally region 1) while the movie is still in theatres in other parts of the world. The movie industry has long used a staggered release schedule, such that movies are released in different countries months after being released in the US. While this allows time for dubbing and subtitling, it also allows for the hype from the US to be used to promote it elsewhere. (If this were the only reason, then region coding would only be used on new releases.)
Second, region codes allow the industry to charge different prices to different customers. It's like a chain of stores hiking prices in lower and upper class neighborhoods (where people don't have cars to shop around or don't care), while cutting prices in middle-class neighborhoods (the gas industry was recently attacked for this practice). With DVDs, instead of doing it by neighborhood, they do it by country. They can charge several times more for the same thing in some parts of the world, and region coding lets them get away with it.
2) the point was not just one person doing it, but meny people... and when a store is loosing $4000 a week they WILL care
Yeah, and when the revolution comes, and the store owners find out that all these people weren't even going to actually buy a DVD player, but were just following advice by moron on slashdot, the store will more likely boycott slashdot, not start selling illegal players. Personally, I wish the best of luck to all these technical barriers. Let the companies have what they want, and let the people decide if they want they. I hate companies like Netscape who make a product illegal to use knowing that people are going to ignore the law and using it as a form of price discrimination (the 30 day free trial joke). I don't enjoy breaking the law but the current system makes you a sucker not to.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
No. The reason for region encoding is so that they can sell separate distribution rights and also sell the DVDs at different prices for different countries. It's like them saying "Hmm.. this DVD will not be too popular in France so let's try and increase sales there by selling it cheaper there but on the other hand we know it will be really popular in Japan so let's try and make some more money by pricing it even higher."
They're separating the market out into segments so that they can target the different points in the supply/demand curves that exist in those different markets. Taking this to an extreme would be what Amazon is doing - which is to separate the market into segments of size 1 person and target the price to hit that demand curve right.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Why all the hassle about region codes, why does it exist in the first place?
Answer: To try and prevent mass illegal copying of disks (A multi million dollars industry in China and the former soviet union). To also allow DVD players in heavily censored countries (china et al) to only be able to play DVD's that are APPROVED of in that country!!
Actual affect of such codes on the illegal copier? None On the public? Added cost, restricted use (what fair use???), and if you happen to travel a lot, your dvd's are worthless when you go home to show Mom and Dad.
DVD is starting to catch on, but as the MPAA continues to do things that just aren't convenient for the consumer, people will continue to thwart the over zealous copyright/censorship efforts. Viscous circle, the more you make it hard for people to do things they EXPECT to be able to do, the more pressure from the consumer for alternatives. This is just another round in a stupid circle.
Funny how the MPAA and the RIAA say "Don't censor us, censorship bad, blah blah blah". Yet they support region codes so that they can sell censored versions of a movie to some country that thinks that a free press and free thinking public should be banned. No Irony there?
Stop the ride I wanna get off.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Just a minor nitpick:
Amazon experimented with different prices for different customers, but has promised never to do it again.
Also, Amazon stated that they didn't target prices based on customer profiles; instead they were experimenting to determine how much the price influenced purchasing decisions. That may or may not be true, but if it is, then it isn't nearly as bad as had been feared.
There are two types of region-free players-- those that have their region permanently hard-wired to the "no-region" region, (I can't remember which one that is... sorry) and those that are "region selectable", like the Apex AD-600A. Region selectable players won't have a problem with anything that they can do to the DVD without breaking compatibility. Good ones (or well-modified ones) are even selectable via the remote. Once you pick a region, the player *is* region-specific player for the region you have chosen. Problem solved.
Umm, if you go into the shop claiming you already have a whole rack full of Japanese DVDs but claiming you don't know squat about regeion coding, you'd better speak in a Japanese accent and act like you just arrived
Or maybe a New Zealand accent.
If a bloke in one's neighbourhood made a pain of himself to the community, we'd just drag him behind the bushes and beat the crap out of him. It's called Pavlovian training.
What is the equivalent method for imparting a degree of community spirit and social responsibility to the studios?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
United States dollars work only in the United States. You could say that they're "region coded" too.US Dollars are acceptable currency on many aircarft and ships at one time they were more acceptable than roubles in Moscow hotels...
Ah, but it doesn't require tamper-proof hardware, only hardware that is sufficiently tamper-resistant.
Here's one piece of the puzzle: let's say that the digital link between a future digital monitor and your video card is encrypted, meaning that open-source software with the keys embedded would defeat the purpose.
...meaning that open-source video drivers for such hardware could conceivably be illegal for much the same reason DeCSS is.
Open Source operating systems suddenly become very, very screwed.
Expand this approach to other hardware.
Game, set, match. I hope you enjoyed your right to read while it lasted.
By the way, Intel is already working on this.
HAND ^_^
DNA just wants to be free...
the different "zones" are outside the federal courts' jurisdiction.
Except that there are plenty of examples to demonstrate that US courts don't understand the concept of "outside jurisdiction".
This would only encourage boot leggers to create find another way around region control. What I would do is first unencrypt the dvd with Decss then create a new DVD with a particular regions code. Now I have DVD that can be read in any region I want.
That's the complex way, if you are one of the "big boys" all you'd need to do is go to a factory where they make the things and say "I'd like X DVD's for region Y, here's Z amount of money for them." The people in these factories arn't stupid, they know the American companies are using them as cheap labour so they are hardly likely to complain about selling some "bootlegs" to "countrymen" for some extra cash.
The end result of all this was a ton of headache for Sony. There have been at least half a dozen different models of the PSX, and in the latest revision they've ditched the serial ports (which means that devices like Gamesharks, which have uses that even Sony considers okay, are useless). Of course, mod-chips still exist, piracy is still rampant, and the people who are doing something LEGAL like importing games get screwed trying to keep up with all of this.
I'd hate it if something like this happens with DVD players thanks to the industry's sheer stupidity. This isn't even about piracy, but about people wanting to do perfectly legal things. It's completely insane...
So what have you done? Yes, you there behind the browser window. Have you done anything to lessen the power of the big companies? Have you done anything to, in whatever small way, discourage the usage of region-coding?
Here's a small tip. It is really a silly one, but yet. It is the only kind of pressure you can easily apply. I did this a few months ago, and it was really satisfying. If many people do it, things would change.
I went with my parents to buy them a DVD player. We went into a big TV/Video/DVD/Washing machines/Refrigerator/etc store, and started talking to one of their sales persons. We explained that we were interested in a DVD player. He showed us to the TV/Video department, and started showing us different players. He went on and on about the relative advantages of the different models, and just when we had homed in on this one model, just when he expected us to say "we'll take that one", I dropped the big question: "Of course it's region-free?" He got an anxious look to his face, and said "Well, no..." We looked very disappointed, and he did too. "Are any of these models region-free?" He looked even more sad than before "Well..., no... But really, you don't..." We just said "thanks" and went out of the store.
Next store, same story. And the next. When we had visited the five largest resellers of TV-related equipment in town, I felt like a king. At all five stores, the sales person looked like he had just lost his job when we left. After all, $200-$400 is rather a lot of money, even for a big store. And it showed clearly that they hadn't even thought about the possibility that region-freeness was a sales argument. They didn't know people wanted that. Now they did.
Luckily for my parents, at the sixth store they had a region-free DVD-player, and we bought that.
Now, if the sales persons at all these stores gets one potential buyer a month that leaves because the store does not carry region-free DVD-players, they don't care. If every sales person gets ten such customers a day, they'll do something about it. And Time-Warner and the others will hear about it too, after a while. Retailers will start to complain that they're losing customers due to the region-coding. Sony and the other big manufacturers will get pressure on them to have region-free models, which they can only do if Time-Warner and the others accept it. So they'll pressure Time-Warner to back off.
So what have you done to discourage region-coded DVD-players? The next time you pass a TV-store, pretend you want to buy a DVD-player. Let the sales person go on for a bit, and just when you have "decided" on a model, drop the killer line "It's region-free, of course?" When they have no region-free models, look very, very disappointed, and say something like "Oh, then I'm not interested. And that player looked so nice, so bad it's region coded." and leave. If they, by chance, do have a region-free model, just say that you're interested but that you'll have to think about it, and that you'll come back another day.
Remember, ten people every day could make a difference. Let's show them what we think.
Why, when you get to make a standard, would you make it *intentionally* incompatible everywhere? It's bad enough with TVs and cellphones, since the US and Europe consistently manage to pick different standards, but why do this when you *have* a choice?
I know this is about control and greed, and not about common sense. Therefore, why do we let these people make the standards? We need an independent group of experts deciding these things, a standards board releasing drafts, and companies implementing the drafts. Period. Also, there can be no patents held on the standards, or if there are patents, they can't be used to restrict an implementation of a draft or standard.
I don't care if this has to be a government regulated activity, or if it takes a little longer, (but not too much longer; that's why we need the drafts) but we can't let the corporations mess up important technology for their own personal gain. The web browser standards war was useless enough, and that didn't have nearly as much money riding on it.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Even if this rumor (and that's all I'm treating it as for now) is true, it won't change much. As has already been pointed out, players that can be manually switched to a given region, sometimes requiring a slight modification to do so (like my Pioneer DVL-909), will not be affected. And there were an awful lot of 909's sold in the US and overseas.
1 eng.htm
h tm
g ion_hack_2/DVD_Region_hack_2.shtml
I sometimes wonder if the studios in general, and Time-Warner in particular, aren't just posturing and saber-rattling. Are the studio execs so disconnected from reality that they don't think the people who want to will find a way around this? And any other barrier that they throw up, to try and restrict where a person can play a disc that they paid for out of their own pocket?
Ah, me... well, if there are any DVL-909 player owners Out There that would like to know how to do the region-switch mod (or some other interesting tweaks) on your unit, here are a couple of useful links.
NOTE: If you're not experienced with working on static-sensitive electronic equipment, and/or you don't have the right tools to do what's described on these sites (small-tip, temperature/ESD-controlled soldering station), AND you value your player, I suggest you avoid doing it yourself. These mods are not for the novice...
http://www.twi.ch/~i7eberha/eng/superhack/909-9
http://www.home-cinema.de/DVD_codefree/pioneer.
http://www.homecinemachoice.com/articles/DVD_Re
Enjoy! And, in doing so, silently tell the studios where they can stick their greedy, anti-consumer practices.
If you look at codefreedvd.com they already claim to have addressed this. You can actually set the player to emulate any specific region that that you want, so that these types of "protection" schemes will fail. It is interesting to see that discs can apparently interrogate the player. I don't know the details, but it looks like discs do have at least some software like functions on them.
I don't know if the differences in television standards were intentionally engineered, but they accomplish the same goal as region codes.
MSK
Here in the UK a DVD costs 20 pounds, which is around $30. You pay $20. Why the difference? OK, $10 is not a huge sum of money, until you translate that into how much the, largely unknowing, public here spend on films. Why the difference? So that consumers can be screwed. Why the region encoding? So that people from the UK don't buy films when they're on holiday in the US like they do now with VHS that they can play in their clever PAL/NTSC VCR. I don't want to patronise you here, but there are 5.8 billion people in the world outside your particular continent, and some of them, impressed by the new technology, but not knowing anything about the crap behind it, are being screwed. On a personal level, I'd like a copy of the X-Men on DVD, but that's only just hit the theatres here, so it's at least 6 months away, and my region-encoded Windows DVD player is now unable to change the region any more, even DVDGenie can't sort it out (at least for now). I've already paid $2000 for a PC with a DVD player, I'm not particularly inclined to shell out another $400 for a dedicated region-free DVD player merely because the US studios want to rip me off. Livid is very close, but not quite, ready for prime time, and the MPAA could still shut them down for the crime of wanting to use their products on a non-approved operating system.
The ramifications in light of the DMCA is interesting to consider: access control is now part of the copyrighted work. Just as one can read past the statement of copyright in a book, is "reading past" the access control on the DVD still within DMCA purview? Is it an offense to lie to the disc about the player type? (Is it a crime to disable Javascript?) Or, since the authority of the copyright holder is now clearly stated as part of the disc "content", is circumvention now a more intentional act, more akin to "breaking and entering" than entering through an unlocked door?
RCE inspires other interesting "features", such as discs that "edit" the content based on what region your player reports (no bush or drugs in region 1, no chewing gum in region 3, etc.). This could streamline studio dealings with censor boards, whose lists of "improper" frame ranges and substitute scenes could be incorporated easily into the disc. This only makes sense if players can be secured, and history has shown that they can't.
-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
Sure would make an interesting court case, though...
As with so many things discussed on Slashdot these days, everybody seems to assume that region codes are a tool used by Big Business to torment Real People. (That's the whole purpose of Big Business, of course... making money and providing jobs is just a bonus.)
I'm not going to try to tell you that region codes are a good thing for the consumer, but let me just explain what region codes are for, from a (relatively) objective standpoint.
Big movies typically get released in the U.S. first. After a few months, they move to Europe... a few months after that, they trickle down to the rest of the world. By the time a movie has its theatrical premiere in Europe or Asia, it has often been released in America on video or DVD. If Europeans can chose between renting a new movie for $4 and seeing it in theaters for perhaps $70 (for a whole family,) a whole lot of them are going to skip the theaters. That kind of defeats the purpose of a theatrical release... hence region codes.
Now, the next question is, why doesn't Big Business just release the movie everywhere at the same time? That's another evil conspiracy, right? No. Copying a film is not like copying an MP3. Copying a film is hard. The cost of film duplication is a substantial chunk of the post-production budget of a movie.* Furthermore, you can only copy a film master so many times before it disintegrates. The reels that are being projected in European theaters right now are actually the same strips of film that were shown in American theaters this summer. Simultaneous worldwide release is just not feasible with film. (Digital projection may change all this, of course.)
So, that's the story on region codes. I'm not going to pass judgement on whether they're good or evil (they certainly annoy me), but it's always good to know the other side of the story.
* Some actual numbers would be nice here. Anyone?
MSK
If we used players that'd switch regions on choice, wouldn't the data get all skewed and make DVD's hard to get in America?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Existing DVD players could be modified to work around this.
Note: The Latin-derived word meaning "to work around" is "circumvent."
New DVD players can be designed to work around this.
Note: The region coding system is an access control system under the DMCA.
Software which runs on general-purpose computers (e.g. livid) can easily be modified to circumvent this.
Note: The DMCA prohibits circumventing the region coding system.
Don't count on getting the DMCA thrown out; the judges and senators have already been bought.
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
United States dollars work only in the United States. You could say that they're "region coded" too.
<O
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XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
As a citizen of Norway, I have to wait approx. 3/4 year for American movies to come out on DVD after they are released in the US. I think that sucks! And so does everybody else here, so they order from the US. But what about the Zones? Good question! Nobody (sic) here cares. I haven't ever seen a DVD player that has the zone system intact here. Every store, including the big chains, have to advertise with zone-free players or else they can't sell any! If the player isn't modified from the import agency, they do it at the store or ship it off to a repair shop that modifies it. Personally, I have a Harman / Kardon DVD-player that is zone-free from the factory (You just enter Pi with 6 digits and the zone to emulate or 0 for zone free).
I can't believe you led everyone on like that and got moderated up for it. You told all of us that you purchased a region free dvd player, but you didn't tell us which model. I'm hurt. I can't believe you'd hate me enough to hurt me like that. *sniff*
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Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
don't current dvds use an encryption scheme other than css now? so doesn't that mean that those dvd players are slightly more versatile than we think?
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Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
This is actually a very good thing to do. As viktor suggests, it gives a great deal of satisfaction to tell them that they aren't stocking what you want. However, pick a senior sales assistant so that your message is more likely to be passed upwards.
I do the same thing when shopping for the DVDs themselves, as I already have a region-free player. The UK is in Region 2, so first of all I ask for a movie that I know is available only in R1, then another, and maybe another. Finally, I ask for one that I know is available in R2 version but cut by the censors or containing fewer features, and when they happily bring it out, beaming with success, I tell them why this version is substandard, and leave.
The end result is probably nil, but it's definitely satisfying. And you never know, maybe a tiny part of the message is getting through.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra