On movies, on games, on whatever. If someone has the equipment to make a copy of something, they have the ability to remove the region code. Every DVD ripping software I’ve ever used (which is admittedly only 2 or 3 programs) asks if you want to remove the region code. I’m less clear about games.
Could someone explain how this actually prevents piracy, and isn’t just designed to be a giant ass pain for someone who lives or travels internationally? Christ, I was astounded to learn that even N64 games have differently shaped cartridges in the US and Japan. Yeah, really difficult copy protection to swap out the backs of the cases with a pair of needle-nose pliers, Nintendo.
Assholes, all of you. This had to be a corporate decision that had no grounding in reality, and is now perpetuated because of tradition and idiocy, much like the war on drugs.
But that’s just my point. Would we really? Every pirated DVD I’ve ever ahem been given by a friend, has no region code. Clearly copies are being made without them. And yet there is no flooding of the US market.
But those copies you’re talking about are copies - they take time and material to make - what region codes prevent is someone simply taking a pallet of region 5 or 2 DVD’s (which have a lower cost in terms of licensing) and shipping them to region 1 or 2 locations, where they could be sold for a higher price.
A ready-to-market factory-made English-language DVD in Russia would have a very high chance of being shipped back to North America or the UK before finding its way to its intended end-user.
Copying has little to do with the intent of region codes.
I think it’s sort of like having locks on our front doors. No, it won’t stop anyone with the time, effort and tools who really wants to get in, but it will deter the folks who would not work for it.
My mother in law, for example, would buy the cheapest DVD possible, but she’s not going to know enough or care enough to remove the region code and rip a copy of her neighbor’s DVD. She’ll pay whatever it costs in the easiest way possible for her to get it. Remove region codes, and sure, she’ll buy the $5 Asian version. But with the region codes in place, she’ll happily pay for the $20 version.
So far, anyhow, people like her outnumber people like you, so it makes sense to keep the region codes intact. Someday that might not be the case, and as soon as it becomes more expensive than profitable to implement, they’ll change it.
I think the number of people who don’t know how to unlock their DVD players outnumber the people who know what region hacks are, and where to find them.
Even if you do, there’s still the PAL/NTSC issue. A PAL DVD (from UK) will not play in most North American (NTSC) DVD players. For that, you need something like an Oppo that can convert PAL to NTSC and vice versa on the fly.
You and me both - but most people are Whynot’s mother-in-law, and the sequence required to unlock their particular DVD player might as well be in a locked box on the far side of the moon.
Region codes as they are go a long way towards keeping DVDs in their intended markets.
When I go into Costco, or Best Buy, or Circuit City, to look over the various DVD players available, they all say on the box “For use only with Region One DVDs,” or something similar. There is nothing in the instruction manual nor the player itself that offers how to change a factory hard-coded machine to a region-free machine.
Region codes and locks were designed to support the business model of the big studios, pure and simple. There is no technical reason that a DVD must have them; many commercial discs don’t have them, and consumer DVD-burners can’t even make discs with them.
They enable a studio to more easily enforce the release of discs at different times and at different prices throughout the world, as distribution deals are made in different areas.
I can’t speak for the movie business, but in the videogame world the main thing region codes due is prevent different divisions of the big corporations from poaching from each other.
Take Sony for example. Most of its international videogame business is handled by three divisions: SCEA, SCEE, and SCEI. They oversee operations in North America, Europe and Asia. Each division develops games independently. If a game has international appeal the other divisions may pick it up, translate it, and distribute it in their own territory. But a lot of games never make it out of their home territory. This makes sense because some games only have local appeal. How many people in the United States want to play a game where you get to drive a Tokyo commuter train on an accurate reproduction of its route? (That’s an actual PS2 game, BTW.)
The thing is, if a division markets a game from another territory, they want to earn the money from it. They don’t want to spend money advertising the thing and then have their potential customers buy it mail-order from overseas. This is particularly true of the territory where the game originated. They risked their money making the thing. They don’t want to lose sales to another division who just happens to be selling it more cheaply because of a temporary fluctuation in exchange rates. Or because of different release dates.
Now you might wonder what difference this makes. All profits eventually percolate up into Sony as a whole. But each division operates as a quasi-independent entity with its own profit and loss calculations and revenue targets. Each division tries to maximize its own profits … even if it comes at the expense of the other divisions.
Say Sony America has a hot game that’s selling like crazy. With region codes they can safely license that game to Sony Europe without worrying about cutting into their North American sales. If region coding didn’t exist then Americans could buy the European version instead of the American version. Ironically, by licensing the game for wider distribution, Sony America could actually hurt their own bottom line.
Judging by the many threads that touch on this, it does seem that region-free DVD players are less common in the US, or at least the knowledge that they can easily be made region-free is less widespread. Here, everybody knows that cheapo supermarket DVD players can be made to be region-free. Some of them are region-free out of the box. But you just Google it, type in a sequence of numbers on the remote, and that’s it.
Of course, it’s a more valuable feature to us, because otherwise we’re locked out of region 1, and therefore cheaper DVDs from Amazon US et al. Maybe Americans don’t care too much about region 2 etc.
Which given the ideals of a free trade economy would be world-wide… right?
Fortunately DVD players in NZ are almost all unlocked out-of-the-box, so while most of my discs are region 4 I have no problems playing region 2’s (either parallel-imported or purchased from the UK) or region 1’s from Amazon… or which I freakin’ well bought while living in the US!
(breathe… remember to breathe) Little hobby-horse, but the idea that movie manufacturers would go out of their way to try and prevent me from playing a disc I purchased completely legitimately on a player that I also own completely legitimately causes a red mist to obscure my vision and makes me contemplate unlawful acts that I would never have considered otherwise. :mad:
I think modern systems can typically cope with this themselves (in my case, for example, a region 1, NTSC DVD plays just fine on my unlocked DVD player and TV, which are both normally playing PAL content. I think there are a number of different strategies employed by TVs and/or DVD players, so I’m not sure which bit of my system, or all of it, is responsible for making it work.
-and I didn’t particularly demand this functionality when I bought the stuff, some six or so years ago.
Not sure if PAL-capability is so prevalent in the USA though…
