Restricting DVDs with area code illegal?
Posted on 28/03/01 15:17 by Robin van Lieshout                             
Restricting DVDs with area code illegal?
Zyron used our newssubmit to tell us:

REGIONAL restrictions on DVDs could be an anti-competitive practice and a breach of the Trade Practices Act, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has warned.

DVD hardware and software makers encode DVDs to play in one of six regions around the world as a means of controlling release dates and fighting piracy.
Australia '“ along with New Zealand, Central and South America '“ is region four. The United States is region one and Japan is region two.

The restrictions mean that Australian consumers wanting to buy imported titles must buy a DVD player from the appropriate region or modify their machines. Legal advice obtained by The Australian IT is that it is legal to put a chip or smart card in a machine to play imported DVDs, as long as the it does not also allow the machine to play copied discs.

But such a change usually voids the product warranty.

ACCC chairman Allan Fels said the commission was investigating whether restrictive region coding breached the Trade Practices Act.

"If the manufacturers have an agreement to do that, it looks like an anti-competitive agreement breaching not only Australian law but laws in other countries," Professor Fels said.


If this is in fact the case it would be very hard to solve this because it concerns all countries. It could mean international co-operation to force the DVD industry to change its ways. But if all films would be available on DVD, nobody would go to they movies. Anyway I would like it

Source: Australian IT

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By webmonkey, Thu 29 Mar 2001 14:42
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This restriction on DVD is also know as planned economics... When deciding upon the regions, they even wanted to slice Europe into 3 pieces (East, south and north/west). So DVD would be much cheaper i.e. Poland and CZ, but the neighbours in Germany would have 2 pay twice or more for the SAME DVD, just because their income i much higher.. The sole purpose of regions is NOT to protect cinemas, but to rip people of, as much as possible.. And yes - it is actually illegal - it goes againt the pricipels of free trade. I know that in some European countries, dealers have been trying to scare costumers, who wanted a region free player into believer is was very very much illegal to crack the code and to import,sell and own ohter region DVDs(this is really sick...). - Probably backed by Sony (Sony owns Columbia Tri Star and ohter studios), who of cause have a major economical interest in people only buying their own region. But Sony know some dealer are suppplying codefree players and have treatened that they "might" not be able to supply players to them, unless their stop selling codefree players... Sony has also been trying to make small changes in the new generation DVDplayers, even within the same model, so that it would become very difficult to make a standard crack... in 2 words - FUCK SONY!

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