DVD-gate continues: Digital Protection Thwarts PM Brown

[Danascot]

U.K. leader can't view Obama's gift

The movie industry's digital protection schemes have turned President Obama's present for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown into little more than a set of coasters.

British newspapers earlier this month made hay out of the supposedly unequal exchange of gifts between the two leaders during Brown's visit to Washington. Brown gave an ornamental pen holder with an indirect tie to the Oval Office desk — both items were made from the timber of sister ships — and a first-edition set of a seven-volume biography about Winston Churchill.

Obama responded with a DVD set featuring 25 classic American movies. "About as exciting as a pair of socks," declared The Daily Mail.

Now it turns out Brown can't play the discs because of region-specific limitations, The Daily Telegraph reports.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2009/03/uk-leader-cant.html

[Traveling_Home]

1. Not this too!!-Not with Special Olympicsgate raging nt/

[MrModerate]

2. I hate that region-specific bullshit. I have a collection of DVDs . . .

Legitimately purchased in the US, the UK, Romania, Hong Kong, and Australia, and the only way I can play all of them is via a utility that disables the regional function on my laptop, from which I feed the signal to my TV.

I can understand the impulse to erect baffles as an impediment to piracy, but after 20 years of copy protection failures, you'd think the distributors'd get it: these schemes penalize the honest consumer without slowing down pirates one little bit.

[Salviati]

3. The region coding isn't even to "combat" piracy... it's a purely marketing concern..

it's so that the distributers can control the release and pricing in each region independently. Of course you can go out and buy region free dvd players, or often times modify existing ones by punching in a special code to render them region free. It only hurts those who don't know any better...

[MrModerate]

4. You're quite right -- marketing above all . . .

But also piracy in the sense that pirates have to accommodate regions in their elicit copies rather than burning a single disk for global (illicit) distribution.

I've purchased region-free players before (I just use a laptop now), and they tend to be grey-market products of dubious quality and reliability. Another example of the consumer being punished because the manufacturer is a) paranoid and b) has been sold a bill of goods by IP-protection grifters in the guise of technology companies.

[Salviati]

5. It doesn't do anything about piracy...

when you copy a disc, you can pretty easily strip out the region code, so any large pirates could quite easily make a reagion free disck for global distribution in any player.

While it's true that a lot of players advertised as region free may be grey market, it's also true that many name brand players have undocumented features you can find on the internet that wil turn them region free. E.G. I have a phillips dvd player that I have set to be region free along with my origional Apex (probably more along the lines of one of those grey market ones, in that you can also turn off the macrovision copy protection...)