Book People Archive

Re: FW: Globalization DVD/E-texts

On Thu, 29 Mar 2001 00:13:51 -0800, "Elder @[redacted] CedarSky.com"  wrote:

>
>Michael S. Hart Wednesday, March 28, 2001 4:34 AM wrote:
><<The players actually come with codes built into them as to what country
>or region of the world they are licensed for. . .thus if you buy a DVD
>in France, it probably won't play DVDs you bought here, and vice versa.
>I have already received email from someone who bought a computer here
>in the US that had a DVD drive from Europe, and it wouldn't play ANY
>of the DVDs available here.  This is really disgusting!>>
>
>The real problem here is the stiff approach to "import" that the United
>States has again adopted with respect to DVD copyright protection. Let me
>explain; it is currently illegal in the United States to own a DVD device
>that reads region 1(US) AND region 2(The rest of the world) DVDs.

Don't disagree with the statement, just the geography:
http://www.unik.no/~robert/hifi/dvd/world.html

Certainly France's suit against Yahoo! illustrates the danger that the
Web might one day be zoned.

>More painfully, I have lately tried accessing several foreign financial
>websites, from the USA, and was surprised to see that access to certain
>areas of these websites is restricted to viewers from the US territories -
>meaning you are blocked from seeing any of the content at all! What next? I
>am seriously considering to move to another country with a greater respect
>for cultural exchange, and a society that encourages intellectual
>versatility.

But these restrictions are certainly not the policy of the US gov, but
of those individual Web sites. Care to drop some URLs?


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