GoodGuy
Posts: 1506
Joined: 5/17/2006 From: Cologne, Germany Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Widell A question regarding DVD's - Is bypassing regional protection illegal? What if I buy (legally, no hot fix or firmware change!) a region free DVD player? I'm asking out curiosity as I have no idea on what the story is here, so would be interesting to know... I wouldn't think that it's illegal, since it's not a real copy-protection. Imho, the regional code had been introduced for various reasons, but one of the main thoughts was to give the distributors (in different countries) a technical protection in addition to their lawful (exlusive) right to serve a particular region/market. That means that it was in the Studios' and the distributors' interest to avoid (legal) imports, in order to protect their pricing and release policies. Example: A friend knew some stewardesses (*grin*) who used to de deployed on the Germany - Hongkong route, like a decade ago. DVDs used to be cheaper over there, plus the release dates (of the original/english versions) were way ahead of the (dubbed) German releases. So my mate got his DVDs cheaper and he had a kind of exclusive deal there, as he was the first who got to see them (at a time where filesharing was widely unknown or useless (due to lack of broadband [A]DSL in Germany). On a sidenote, he had to deal with those funny Chinese subtitles with quite some of those DVDs, so he used to get the German versions later on, if he really liked a movie (plus his English sucked anyway, hehe). I used to work part time for a japanese company (daughter of SONY) during my studies, and some techs gave out master codes to some employees (you had to press several buttons in a certain order), which would disable the region protection on the DVD-players they had bought during internal staff sales. Without disabling the protection, you will be limited to say ASIAN region DVDs (in case you legally obtain "Hongkong"-CDs) after a while, because once you've activated a region you're limited to watch DVDs from that particular region (it used to be that way, at least). Even with (internal/external) DVD-Rom drives, you have to opt for a particular region after a while (this happens automatically, I guess, after you've played something between 5-10 DVDs from a part. region). With a DVD-Rip-program one would be able to freely choose and switch the region code, plus one can remove the code completely while a given DVD is transfered to the harddisk, but the transfer may already violate copyright laws in quite some countries, even though the region scheme is not a dedicated copy-protection scheme. Whatsoever, even with all the different copyright laws in other countries, I don't think it's illegal to obtain/use a free region player, I just think that you won't find any.
< Message edited by GoodGuy -- 3/31/2010 12:10:45 AM >
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