Posted by WinField on 01/08/07 16:59

nobody wrote:
> Aren't there laws banning "Any distinction, exclusion, restriction or
> preference based on race, colour, ethnic or national origin".
>
> Region coding excludes people based on national origin. It also allows
> preference based on national origin (if the same company charges a large
> amount more for a region 2 title than it does for the region 1 title).


Here's an excerpt from a LONG essay on Digital Wrongs Management:
http://www.dashes.com/anil/stuff/doctorow-drm-ms.html

"But anticirumvention lets rightsholders invent new and exciting
copyrights for themselves -- to write private laws without
accountability or deliberation -- that expropriate your interest in your
physical property to their favor. Region-coded DVDs are an example of
this: there's no copyright here or in anywhere I know of that says that
an author should be able to control where you enjoy her creative works,
once you've paid for them. I can buy a book and throw it in my bag and
take it anywhere from Toronto to Timbuktu, and read it wherever I am: I
can even buy books in America and bring them to the UK, where the author
may have an exclusive distribution deal with a local publisher who sells
them for double the US shelf-price. When I'm done with it, I can sell it
on or give it away in the UK. Copyright lawyers call this "First Sale,"
but it may be simpler to think of it as "Capitalism."

The keys to decrypt a DVD are controlled by an org called DVD-CCA, and
they have a bunch of licensing requirements for anyone who gets a key
from them. Among these is something called region-coding: if you buy a
DVD in France, it'll have a flag set that says, "I am a French DVD."
Bring that DVD to America and your DVD player will compare the flag to
its list of permitted regions, and if they don't match, it will tell you
that it's not allowed to play your disc.

Remember: there is no copyright that says that an author gets to do
this. When we wrote the copyright statutes and granted authors the right
to control display, performance, duplication, derivative works, and so
forth, we didn't leave out "geography" by accident. That was on-purpose.

So when your French DVD won't play in America, that's not because it'd
be illegal to do so: it's because the studios have invented a
business-model and then invented a copyright law to prop it up. The DVD
is your property and so is the DVD player, but if you break the
region-coding on your disc, you're going to run afoul of anticircumvention.

That's what happened to Jon Johansen, a Norweigan teenager who wanted to
watch French DVDs on his Norweigan DVD player. He and some pals wrote
some code to break the CSS so that he could do so. He's a wanted man
here in America; in Norway the studios put the local fuzz up to bringing
him up on charges of *unlawfully trespassing upon a computer system.*
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon trespassed upon?" the
answer was: "His own."

His no-fooling, real and physical property has been expropriated by the
weird, notional, metaphorical intellectual property on his DVD: DRM only
works if your record player becomes the property of whomever's records
you're playing."

- & -

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