response 116 of 126:

Sep 28 16:29 UTC 2000

Re: 108
Actually, the DVD issue was what I was addressing with a country having
declared that the devices must be modified.  Based on some information
found at opendvd.org, it would appear that some european countries have
declared the region coding illegal for one reason or another.  I had read
once that New Zealand specifically did restraint of trade stuff, but as I
hunt for data I can't seem to find anything specific.

On the other hand, players that have some to all of the Hollywood-imposed
"security" features forced on them are available readily via web
merchants.  Add a decent standards converter from Tenlab, and it can then
be of relevance to you that the whole first season of "Buffy the Vampire
Slayer" is being released in the UK in the next month or two as a box set
of DVDs.  Locally, I think that there a whopping 8 or 9 tapes available in
North America, with no DVDs due.  In the UK, 3 seasons on VHS and DVDs
coming.  The copyright holders would say that you have to live with that
and are in the wrong if you do not wait until they say your location can
buy this stuff.  They may have actually said this outright someplace, but
the region coding system only makes what little sense that it does if
that is the case, so I deem its existence to be that statement.

The above nonsense is why I have an account with a UK video dealer.

Alternate US editions of books are why I have an account with a UK book
dealer.  (One year-plus edition delays are another big point.)

The copyright industry would likely put me in chains for just that, if
they could.

Re:109
On your last point, as the region scheme of DVD illustrates, the opinion
of copyright holders is that their items are only legal in places where
they've released them, and since few seem willing to abide by that, they
are turning to technological means to enforce thier opinion.

response 118 of 126:

Sep 28 20:27 UTC 2000

  re #116: 

    > and since few seem willing to abide by that, they are 
    > turning to technological means to enforce their opinion.

  It's more twisted than that..  Having failed to maintain their
  oligopoly on copying and distribution, as new technologies arose
  that allowed copying to become decentralized (as nearly everyone
  got access to a copying device..) they abandoned their primarily
  legal approach to containing copying in favor of technological
  means.  But then they also lobbied for (and got) legal weapons
  to use against the producers of technology, so we have things like
  the DMCA, a legal weapon to use against people who are producing
  technological countermeasures to circumvent the technological weapons
  they adopted because their original legal weapons weren't working..

  Any honest participant in the discussion pretty much has to concede
  that there aren't enough courtrooms in America to try every person
  who would illegally duplicate copyrighted material if it were made
  exceedingly easy to do so -- you need only look at Napster's subscriber
  lists to determine that.  The publishing companies know their only
  option, unless they want to relax their control on music/book/movie
  distribution and pricing, is to attack the infringement chain at its
  weakest link (or perhaps its narrowest bottleneck..)  That weak point
  used to be the few infringers who owned the heavy equipment needed for
  mass duplication.  These days the weak point is where there are
  (relatively) few people with the technological knowledge and skill to
  circumvent the publishers' technological protections.

response 120 of 126:

Sep 28 22:52 UTC 2000

  Ahh, but the two issues are naturally linked because in order to
  exert control in either case you need to have some way to deny the
  data stream to the end consumer and an intermediary of some sort,
  controlled only by you, to handle the translation.  Having gone to
  the trouble of designing (albeit poorly) such a system to fight
  the easiest sort of illegal copying, DVD publishers have recognized
  that they can use the same technology to control regional viewing
  and have chosen to do so..

  Expect to see more and more intrusive developments in this front.
  Recent posts in Slashdot have pointed to news stories about a dental
  school which is switching to time-limited digital texts -- students
  pay (a lot) for a dentistry text that comes on CD-ROM.  The contents
  are licensed to them, and them only, for a limited time and unavailable
  after their time-limited decryption key expires.  Textbook publishers
  must be drooling over this technology, which promises to cripple that
  pesky competition from the used textbook market..

response 122 of 126:

Sep 29 02:44 UTC 2000

University bookstores will hate that.  Most of their profit comes from used
textbooks, not new ones.

response 124 of 126:

Sep 30 18:54 UTC 2000

That doesn't just affect those who want to buy and sell used books.  I
generally like to keep stuff I've read, so that I can go back and look at it
again if I have a question.  It's a big part of why I always buy books rather
than checking them out of libraries.

response 126 of 126:

Oct 14 22:45 UTC 2000

Now linked to cyberpunk.