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Australia Rules DVD's are Films, Not Software
divereigh writes: "The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that an Australian Federal court has decided this case in favour of the Australian Video Rental Association. The Association had taken Warner Home Video to court for trying to classify DVD's as software and thus double the price for those sold into the rental market."
Can be found here. It is dating back to Novemeber 05, 2001.
--Metrollica
DVD videos are _NOT_ software. They are a _STORAGE MEDIUM_. Just like VCDs. I can make a VCD in Nero with the "logic" you describe --- a menu system, even images that backdrop it. Is it software? Hell no. The studios are just trying to make another quick buck - region coding is _not_ "nasty malicious code."
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
uh, australia? what the fook does that have to do with the United States?
:-)
Speaking as an Australian, I hold some hope your painfully US-centric attitude can be rectified.
Last time I checked , we were using something loosely defined as the World-Wide-Web , not the United-States-Web, so I think it is entirely relevant, as one day a reference to this particular decision could help you.
Your comment portrays a bad image of the U.S. to the rest of the world. Wake up. The sun does not shine out of the US's collective posterior.
Don't make me have to come over there and kick your ass to prove it
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Actually, price descrimination can be a good thing. For example, price descrimination is largely responsible for the availability of cheap airline tickets and airline tickets being generally available on short notice. Without price descrimination, you'd likely have a situation where you'd pay more than the cheapest fares these days and/or there'd be no seats available for the last minute traveller.
The DVD region system was a good idea, but it's poorly implemented. It's supposed to allow cheap DVDs to be sold in places like India without affecting the market in the US and Europe. Without it, DVDs would probably never be released in India at all, or they'd be released there at the same price as in the US and the middle class wouldn't be able to afford them. I don't see how either of these outcomes is better than $5 DVDs that only work in local DVD players.
"Broadcast Quality" is a meaningless term. [...] for broadcast, dvd is better than anything you'll see on TV.
The FCC requires all on-air programming to conform to a strict definition of "broadcast quality", one which has absolutely nothing to do with the downstream picture you see on TV, cable, satellite, etc. This definition involves a series of quantifications (luminance s/n ratio, chroma s/n, resolution, differential gain, differential phase, subcarrier color framing, RS-170A sync, comb filtered inputs, subcarrier frequency drift, multiburst response or bandwidth) that are best highlighted when viewed under a vectorscope or a wavescope.
No, DVD's are not "broadcast quality."
DISCLAIMER: i am australian
The real issues in this case was that Warner decided to create a tiered system for DVD rental. Retail DVDs where marked as such and sold for standard prices (around $30 or so AUD, which is quite reasonable). Rental DVDs were at least double the price, and the publisher said that it was illegal to use retail movies for rental purposes. Big copyright notices and disclaimers are places in all retails movies to ensure that consumers are alered to the legalities if they rent one.
The effect of this was that the big coroprate rental shops (Blockbuster and VideoEzy among very few others) bore the cost, but the smaller and local rental places could not afford the new system and their business was threatend.
This smaller rental shops are the ones who took legal action.
technoshamanic resistance within hyper-transgressive ontology
The court case was not about DVD in general, but about Movie DVDs in particular. WB was trying to say that because a miniscule part of a nomal movie DVD is software for menus and such that the whole this should be considered software. This has nothing to do with DVDs in general.
The court basically said that the reason people by DVD Movies is to watch the movie, and not use the software, and so Movies on DVD should not be considered software.
Wheatly, get a brain, read the story and give the moderators who modded him up some anti-depressants so they may have a clue.
- subsolar
News: One of many stories on the decision
The full text of the decision
Used to be Slashdot folks were on top of things.
Buttons on DVD menus can actually be set up to execute arbitrary sequences of code. However, in most DVD Videos the buttons are just links to other menus or parts of the movie, so I guess that is why you felt that there wasn't any executable code on the disc.
I've looked at the code that is uploaded and executed and no-one would dispute that it is executable code - it has assignments and conditional branches.
But I did read the actual decision provided by another poster (earlier in the thread).
My interpretation could be off (I always seem to read legalese different from real laywers) but...
The Judge defined software, copyright, etc as it applies in Australian Law.
Both parties agreed you could rent DVDs.
Both parties agreed to the study of 2 titles as representative of all video DVDs.
Australian Law prohibits the rental of software.
The Judge spent some time going over the definition of software, and in particular that it is a set of instructions which produces a result.
You must be able to define the result; for example it does not follow that every result is protected by the same license/copyright. An analogy might be "Adobe doesn't own every work created in PhotoShop".
He found that the SW is nothing more than what is encompassed in the DVD-Video specifications, and controls play, stop, etc. He also found that if there is no movie, the sw does nothing (no result). I think this might have been the case-breaker for WB, but I'll leave that to real lawyers. He therefore concluded that it is the movie and not the sw the consumer is intending to rent.
He found that storage of data in memory (what a DVD player does) did not constitute copying of SW because the data is not normally accessable; is briefly stored and constantly replaced over the course of watching the film in real time. He agreed a computer along with additional SW (ie. SW not used to simply view the movie on a computer) could be used to do so but concluded it did not represent the intended use of most consumers when they rent.
They also analized the data and determined how many bits were sw and movie (about 5/95); and concluded the sw component is incidental to the use by consumers.
He considered the many additional features of DVD over VHS but concluded it was merely part of the format. The format allows for all kinds of information to be stored, and they defined DVD-Audio, data, MPEG-2, and others.